Urban air mobility safety concerns paramount as growing industry moves into the future
ALAMEDA, Calif., - As urbanization - the movement of rural residents to urban areas - continues worldwide, the number of cities with populations topping more than 10 and 20 million residents is expected to grow throughout the 21st century. With the streets, sidewalks, and public transportation systems full of people traversing Delhi, Beijing, New York, and Lagos, among others growing more full by the day, technology companies large and small have turned their eyes skyward.
Longtime industry giants like Boeing, Airbus, and Honeywell are reaching out to form partnerships with start-up companies and players from outside aviation - think the rideshare company Uber - and are looking to move people around cities with electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft.
Of course, moving about in airspace occupied by skyscrapers, elevated train tracks, and soon, near countless other urban air mobility (UAM) aircraft will create issues of safety. How will we stop automated UAM aircraft from different companies from colliding in mid-air, missing the landing pad, or running into buildings?
Wind River of Alameda, Calif., has made safety a priority in all of its software solutions including autonomous mobility platforms on the ground and in the skies in civilian and military applications. One product offered by Wind River is its Helix Virtualization Platform, which enables future applications by using multi-OS virtualization onto a single software platform.
According to Wind River, Collins Aerospace is among the companies utilizing the Helix Virtualization Platform for developing its next-gen avionics systems that embrace open architecture design to provide cost-effective solutions that can be easily upgraded. To learn more about the Helix platform, please click here. To learn more about Wind River's offerings, please visit https://www.windriver.com/index.html.
