Urban Air Mobility

Development of a Modeling Framework for Analyzing Improvements in Intermodal Connectivity at California Airports

Lu, Xiao-Yun
Gosling, Geoffrey D.
Shladover, Steven E.
Xiong, Jing
Ceder, Avi
2006

This report has been prepared as part of a research project developing a combined quantitative and qualitative approach to planning for improved intermodal connectivity at California airports. The quantitative approach involves the development of an Intermodal Airport Ground Access Planning Tool (IAPT) that combines an air passenger mode choice model, a model of transportation provider behavior and a traffic network analysis model. The qualitative approach will be used to enhance the quantitative analysis to account for those factors which are difficult to quantify and to provide...

Planning for Advanced Air Mobility

Cohen, Adam
Shaheen, Susan
Wulff, Yolanka
2024

Advanced air mobility (AAM) could result in fundamental changes to land use and the built environment and transform how people access essential services (e.g., emergency and medical services), goods, and mobility. While the impacts of these innovations remain to be seen, planners and policymakers need to prepare for these changes to minimize the potential for adverse impacts and maximize the likelihood of sustainable and equitable outcomes.

Geometry of Vanishing Points and its Application to External Calibration and Realtime Pose Estimation

Kim, ZuWhan
2006

Vanishing points of an image contain important information for camera calibration. Various calibration techniques have been introduced using the properties of vanishing points to find intrinsic and extrinsic calibration parameters. This paper revisits the vanishing points geometry and suggests a simple extrinsic parameter estimation algorithm which uses a single rectangle. The comparison with the Camera Calibration Toolbox for Matlab ® shows that the proposed algorithm is highly competitive. The suggested technique is also applied to a realtime pose estimation for an unmanned air vehicle’s...

Advanced Air Mobility: Opportunities, Challenges, and Research needs for the State of California (2023-2030)

Cohen, Adam, MS
Shaheen, Susan, PhD
2024

Advanced air mobility (AAM) is a broad concept that enables consumers access to air mobility, goods delivery, and emergency services through an integrated and connected multimodal transportation network. AAM can provide short-range urban, suburban, and rural flights of about 50-miles and mid-range regional flights up to a several hundred miles. State law delegates responsibility for oversight in aviation primarily to the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans). This white paper presents an overview of the state of the market, such as the aircraft under development and forecast...

Urban Air Mobility: Viability of Hub-Door and Door-Door Movement by Air

Bulusu, Vishwanath
Sengupta, Raja
2020

Owing to a century of innovation in connected and automated aircraft design, for the rst time in history, air transport presents a potential competitive alternative to road, for hub-to-door and door-to-door urban services. In this article, we study the viability of air transport, for moving people and goods in an urban area, based on three metrics - enroute travel time, fuel cost and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. We estimate the metrics from emission standards and operational assumptions on vehicles based on current market data and compare electric air travel to gasoline road travel. For...

SimUAM: A Comprehensive Microsimulation Toolchain to Evaluate the Impact of Urban Air Mobility in Metropolitan Areas

Yedavalli, Pavan
Burak Onat, Emin
Peng, Xin
Sengupta, Raja
Waddell, Paul
Bulusu, Vishwanath
Xue, Min
2021

Over the past several years, Urban Air Mobility (UAM) has galvanized enthusiasm from investors and researchers, marrying expertise in aircraft design, transportation, logistics, artificial intelligence, battery chemistry, and broader policymaking. However, two significant questions remain unexplored: (1) What is the value of UAM in a region’s transportation network?, and (2) How can UAM be effectively deployed to realize and maximize this value to all stakeholders, including riders and local economies? To adequately understand the value proposition of UAM for metropolitan areas, we develop...

An Analysis of Air Passenger Average Trip Lengths and Fare Levels in US Domestic Markets

Huang, Sheng-Chen Alex
2000

At a national level it is common to express the amount of air travel in terms of the number of revenue passenger miles flown or the number of enplaned passengers. This provides a way to resolve the difficulty of how to aggregate measures of air travel in many different markets of many different distances. However, information about the distribution of trip lengths is lost in the process. This information is of interest for a number of reasons. The type of aircraft that is most appropriate for different markets depends on the distances involved. The length of the trip is also likely to...

Environmental Life-cycle Assessment of Passenger Transportation: A Detailed Methodology for Energy, Greenhouse Gas and Criteria Pollutant Inventories of Automobiles, Buses, Light Rail, Heavy Rail and Air

Chester, Mikhail
Horvath, Arpad
2007

The passenger transportation modes of auto, bus, heavy rail, light rail and air are critical systems relied upon for business and leisure. When considering their environmental effects, most studies and policy focus on the fuel use of the vehicles, and ignore the energy and other resource inputs and environmental outputs from the life cycles of necessary infrastructures, fuels, and vehicles. The goal of this project is to develop comprehensive life-cycle assessment (LCA) models to quantify the energy inputs and emissions from autos, buses, heavy rail, light rail and air transportation in...

Future of Aviation: Advancing Aerial Mobility through Technology, Sustainability, and On-Demand Flight

Cohen, Adam
Shaheen, Susan, PhD
2023

Advanced air mobility (AAM) is a broad concept enabling consumers access to air mobility, cargo and package delivery, healthcare applications, and emergency services through an integrated and connected multimodal transportation network. AAM includes local use cases of about a 50-mile radius in rural or urban areas and intraregional use cases of up to approximately 500 miles that occur within or between urban and rural areas. The Future of Aviation Conference: Advancing Aerial Mobility through Technology, Sustainability, and On-Demand Flight was held in person at the San Francisco...

The Potential Societal Barriers of Urban Air Mobility (UAM)

Shaheen, Susan, PhD
Cohen, Adam
Farrar, Emily
2018

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is an emerging concept of air transportation where small package delivery drones to passenger-carrying air taxis operate over populated areas, from small towns to the largest cities are being considered. This could revolutionize the way people move within and around cities by shortening commute times, bypassing ground congestion, and enabling point-to-point flights across cities. In recent years, several companies have designed and tested enabling elements of this concept, including; prototypes of Vertical Take-Off Landing (VTOL) capable vehicles, operational...