Digital Airport

ASTAIR

Auto steer taxi at airport

ASTAIR project will start on Sept 1st 2023 ASTAIR - Auto-Steer Taxi at AIRport - aims at designing a support tool for fully automated ground operations supervision. The objective is to prototype an HMI and support algorithm that autonomously manage vehicles movements on ground with enough flexibility to allow the supervisor to locally tweak the algorithm rules to cope with operationnal events.

Project website

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme in the call HORIZON-SESAR-2022-DES-ER-01.

AEON

Advanced Engine Off Navigation

AEON is a European project funded by SESAR Joint Undertaking that aims at innovating airport ground operations with more environmentally friendly taxiing techniques for the aviation sector. In particular it aims to define a concept of operations for engine-off taxiing techniques, making use of novel technologies that are coming onto the market, such as Taxi Bots, E-Taxi and Single Engine Taxiing.

Video presenting the Concept of Operations:

Video presenting the validation sessions in ACHIL’s facilities:

Project website

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 892928.

NewSense

Affordable A-SMGCS

NewSense is a research and development project that aims at improving safety and efficiency of operations primarily in secondary airports with innovative low-cost surface surveillance solutions, based on 5G cellular networks for the long term, and mmWave radar for the medium term, allowing the implementation of affordable Advanced-Surface Movement Guidance and Control Systems (A-SMGCS).

Project results

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 893917.

ENVISION

Radar image without radar

ENVISION is an ATM application-oriented research project which aims at making use of technical progress in CCTV cameras, LIDAR technology and image processing techniques, and at taking advantage of reduced equipment costs, to provide regional and local airports safe and affordable surface movements surveillance capabilities in support of A-SMGCS and A-CDM services.

Project results

This project has received funding from the SESAR Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 783270

Darius

Digitalisation of Regional Airports

The project, financed by the “fonds européen de développement régional (FEDER)” under French authority aims at improving airport’s visibility over all operations that may affect an aircraft Turn Around.

The designed tool aims at helping Ground Handler staff plan and assign tasks and vehicles to operators. In real time the tool also helps briefing before starting the operations.

The project relies on extensive image processing (using cameras at stands) to detect movements around the aircraft and characterize the related operation (fueling, catering, handling, aircraft maintenance, etc). Using artificial intelligence (AI) the projects estimates and monitors the remaining time left for each operation and, whenever applicable, raises alarms to airport operators for action.

This project has received funding from the French program READYNOV and FEDER

MoTa

Modern Taxiing

The purpose of MOTA is to propose a ground control interface which would not only enable full automation, but also support the transition period during which the human operator would be able to gradually take advantage of the algorithms and automation in a non-intrusive manner. The objective is to explore the use of Multi-Agent System (MAS) as a means to integrate and experiment with different automation levels.

This project aims to address the automation of taxiing from the ATC perspective through two main ideas: multilayer HMI and mixed initiative. The Multi-layered interface paradigm allows users to choose and adapt the complexity of the interface controls by simply adding layers on top of each other. It provides a shared common view and seamless modes to achieve different task eventually at different level of abstraction. The Mixed initiative is an initiative mode where the human and artificial agents collaborate in a shared decision process to preserve the best perceived level of autonomy.

Final Report

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No E02.24.

TaCo

TAke COntrol

TACO - TAke COntrol was a SESAR 2020 Exploratory Research. TaCo aims to define an automated system able to both support ground and tower controllers’ tasks in airport operations and assess its own ability to deal with non-nominal conditions. TaCo project defines a framework for design, deployment and verification of automated tools for airports with the involvement of end-users since the beginning (end-users programming of airport surface movements management). ENAC was in charge of designing the Domain Specific Graphic Language (DSGL) for Airport Automation and developing the HMI proof of concept.

Project results

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 699382.

MoTo

Embodied Remote Tower

MOTO project explored the opportunity to enhance the human performance in a remote tower platforms from the perspective of embodied cognition (improving the sense of presence and immersion). The goal was to ultimately augmenting human-system interaction with multisensory feedback. The project identified key multimodal stimuli in the current control tower operations and defined user requirements for a multimodal Remote Tower, to reconstruct multimodal perception in a remote tower simulation platform and enhance ATCOs sense of presence.

Project results

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 699379.