AUTONODYNE LLC — Department of Defense STTR Phase I: AFX20D-TCSO1

Description

Autonodyne has been at the forefront of autonomy in aviation for two decades, applying autonomy in every aspect of aviation. The last 5 years’ efforts have brought the same avionics, autonomy, and interfaces to unmanned aviation, both for DoD and for the emerging Urban Air Mobility (UAM and Advanced Air Mobility - AAM) market. Autonodyne was hand selected by NASA/FAA to bring our expertise in Autonomy for UAM to their Enabling Autonomous Flight and Operations in the NAS (National Air Space) Workshops in 2019 and their 2020 Fly by Wire Summit II: Automation Integration for Simplified Handling Qualities (SHQ). The General Aviation Manufacturer’s Association (GAMA) also have asked for our autonomy and human-interface expertise in their latest Simplified Vehicle Operations (SVO) Summit this last Spring. This expertise is being leverage under current, UAM working relationships with ORB contract companies Beta Technologies and Joby - expertise that can be leveraged for potential use in Humanitarian and Disaster Response (HADR) missions, logistics missions, and potentially any mission in support of DoD activities. Autonodyne’s technologies are vehicle agnostic – they enable autonomy on board any eVTOL, UAM vehicle, or ORB as defined by Agility Prime ICO. Our autonomy stack enables autonomy through every aspect of the mission - from planning, command and control (C2), and in-flight autonomous mission and support behaviors (including autonomous sense and avoid) to debrief. Current DoD efforts have deployed aspects of our on-board autonomy/interface on programs ranging from Group 1 UAS for Navy Special Warfare (NSW) to Group 5 UAS for AFRL/DIU/STRATCOM in which we use our Human-Autonomy Interface to oversee multiple, fully autonomous, near-Mach 1 vehicles. Current efforts for AAM/UAM include two ORB surrogate aircraft. Company/partner general aviation aircraft (C-172 / CR-22) have been fitted with our avionics and on-board autonomy to demonstrate vehicle agnostic autonomous operation in every phase of flight to include mission planning and even debrief. These autonomous operations are overseen via our human-autonomy interface which maximizes situational awareness, minimizes task load, and requirements minimal time to learn given its intuitive, human-factor tested design. It is this level of Complete Mission Autonomy that Autonodyne hopes to leverage to meet the particular FOCAS AREA 1 topics. HADR, Logistic, and DoD mission sets all contain similarities to those faced by AAM/UAM. A thorough feasibility study to address the risks and potential payoffs of transitioning our innovative technologies for these missions should lead to a path to provide expanded mission capability to the broad range of government and civil users. Complete Mission Autonomy will enable ORBs for distributed logistics, sustainment, maneuver, medical evacuation, firefighting, disaster relief, installation and border security, search and rescue, humanitarian operations and more.