Urban Air Mobility Concepts and Technologies for Safe and Integrated City Operations
This project, carried out by researchers from the Information Processing and Telecommunications Center (IPTC), has focused on the definition, design, and validation of advanced concepts and technologies for highly automated management of urban air operations. The work—now completed—addressed the integration of multiple modes of aerial activity, including UTM, UAM, ATM, and piloted emergency missions, ensuring safe operations while supporting diverse types of urban aerial services.
A major outcome is the development of new operational concepts for integrated urban traffic management, spanning strategic planning, tactical separation, and autonomous control. A high-fidelity simulator was produced to reproduce complex scenarios, support fleet management, and evaluate cooperative surveillance and advanced authorization processes—covering a significantly broader operational spectrum than typically found in the literature.
The project also delivered advanced technologies for information acquisition, fusion, visualization, and interaction. These include context-aware fusion mechanisms, deep-learning-based perception, multimodal interaction models, immersive interfaces for urban control centers, and edge-computing capabilities enabling onboard AI processing on aerial vehicles. These developments enhance decision-making, improve situational awareness, and enable natural human–machine interaction paradigms.
To validate the proposed concepts and technologies, the project implemented demonstrators combining real flights with high-fidelity simulation. These showcased autonomous fleet operations, integration with smart-city systems, and performance in complex transport, urban planning, and security scenarios. Advanced applications—including cooperative UAV operations and deep-reinforcement-learning-based decision-making—were successfully tested on realistic mission profiles.
Overall, the project has produced validated architecture, simulation tools, interaction technologies, and operational concepts that significantly advance safe, integrated, and intelligent urban air mobility.
Project website: https://iptc.upm.es/cactus/
ID Project: PID2020-118249RB-C21
Financed by: MCIN/ AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033/
Juan Alberto Besada Portas: GS / ORCID / LinkedIn
Ana María Bernardos Barbolla: GS / ORCID / LinkedIn
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/iptc-upm/
For more information: www.iptc.upm.es
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