AURORA is a cross-disciplinary project aiming at linking aeronautical, smart mobility, intelligent systems, urban planning, and citizens’ engagement with industry, authorities and citizens perspectives to foster the adoption of urban air mobility.
AURORA primary focuses on emergency-related applications, such as medical emergency services and/or critical mobility infrastructure-related services, where urban air mobility can extend and complement current mobility systems. We believe that applications, where urban air mobility brings added value on top of the existing solutions, have a clear value proposition for the end-user and represent a fruitful path for early urban air mobility services acceptance. However, to get there technological, regulatory, economic, environmental and social challenges still need to be addressed and related gaps bridged. AURORA focuses on bridging these gaps and facilitating the integration of urban air mobility in a safe, secure, quiet and green manner. In more depth, AURORA research and innovation activities aim at implementing the enablers of intelligent urban air mobility for a multitude of safety-critical applications in the urban environment. One of the key enablers of the urban air mobility is an intelligent and autonomous self-piloted or UAV capable of autonomous trajectory generation while detecting and avoiding obstacles (both aerial and ground objects) in normal and abnormal conditions. AURORA will focus on the development of intelligent and fail-safe guidance-navigation-control features of the unmanned aerial system and augmented manned platform operating in an urban environment. This includes, among others, an autonomous and continuous selection of emergency landing sites and automated landing in case of fatal malfunctioning of the unmanned aerial vehicle itself. The use-cases include decision making support to emergency services and insertion and extraction of life support items or victims/first responders at the location of the incident.