Help us enrich our research efforts & receive the remaining 40k of our 80k research grant!

Our project proposal titled "Urban Air Mobility (UAM) Contingency Diagnosis Toolkit" was selected by NASA as a part of the University Student Research Challenge. Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is a collective vision of redefining air transportation shared by government agencies, academia, and industry. Recent market studies commissioned by NASA estimated that there could be up to 500 million flights annually for package delivery services and 750 million flights annually for air metro services throughout the country. 

Services ranging from low-risk operations such as package delivery and infrastructure inspection to high-risk operations such as emergency transport and search & rescue will be enabled by highly automated aircraft and services. Although efficient and safe automation exists today, humans present the most capacity to adapt to failures in any system. Thus, a major engineering challenge is enabling humans and automation to effectively act as a team.

To address these engineering challenges, the project team, comprised entirely of Ohio State students, is developing novel information representations to assist humans in monitoring this future airspace. The team is also developing a simulated air traffic control environment to investigate the usefulness of these representations in recognizing the need to intervene with automated services, which can also be used as a tool for future human-automation teaming research. 

Funds generated via crowdfunding will enrich our research efforts by allowing us to engage with more air traffic experts, enhance the statistical value of our testing efforts, and broaden our voices in addressing future human automation-teaming challenges.