Restricted Research - Award List, Note/Discussion Page
Fiscal Year: 2023
72 University of North Texas (141960)
Principal Investigator: Namuduri,Kameswara Rao
Total Amount of Contract, Award, or Gift (Annual before 2011): $ 745,670
Exceeds $250,000 (Is it flagged?): Yes
Start and End Dates: 5/16/22 - 5/15/25
Restricted Research: YES
Academic Discipline: Electrical Engineering
Department, Center, School, or Institute: College of Engineering
Title of Contract, Award, or Gift: Resilient Supply Chain Ecosystem for Agile Manufacturing of Unmanned Aircraft Systems
Name of Granting or Contracting Agency/Entity:
National Aeronautics & Space Administration
CFDA: 43.008
Program Title: none
Note:
University of North Texas (UNT) is a Tier-1 research institution as well as a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) located in DFW Metropolitan area in the middle of the booming aerospace industry. UNT has been actively engaged in NASA’s Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) National Campaign (NC) program since its inception. After successful completing the NC Development Test program (X3) in 2020, UNT is currently leading the North Texas Cohort in the NC-1 flight test activities that are planned to be conducted in 2022. Advanced air mobility (AAM) refers to “transformative and disruptive new airborne technology supporting an ecosystem designed to transport people and things to locations not traditionally served by current modes of air transportation, including both rural and the more challenging and complex urban environments”, according to the National Academies Press 2020 publication. Platforms being developed for AAM applications such as electric powered Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVToL) aircraft, are typically short-range, runway independent, and highly automated vehicles. Community testbeds and service frameworks (e.g., Aerial Experimentation Research Platform for Advanced Wireless (AERPAW) Research and U-Space framework for safe and secure access to airspace) are also being developed for experimentation of AAM applications around the world. As a result, anticipated challenges include airspace operations, traffic management, vehicle health integrity monitoring, and human-autonomy teaming. There is a need for identifying efficient strategies for collision avoidance in close encounters between aircraft, detection of uncooperative and rogue aircraft, geofencing, and GPS-denied operation strategies. To implement these strategies, an Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) require embedded sensing, wireless communication, intelligent control systems that are power efficient through circuit and structural design. These strategies also require changes in the aerospace manufacturing supply chain. Typically, aerospace manufacturing has been focused on low-volume high-cost production. As become more endemic, there is a growing need to harvest the strengths of high-volume manufacturing typically utilized for consumer applications with the certification and reliability expected for aerial systems. To meet this need, the material-design-manufacturing-supply chain will require integration of large-scale industry-small business-academic partnerships. Further, the workforce needs are clear, requiring additional curriculum and education options to be attractive to the K-12 pipeline, post-secondary and current industry workers.
Discussion: No discussion notes