Transformative Digital Air Vehicle with IoT Sensors for Safer Urban Skies (AVATAR)

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AVATAR is dedicated to developing a digital twin by continuously monitoring the operation of transformative air vehicles (TAV) through an innovative smart Internet of Things (IoT) sensing skin, informed by accurate physical models and advanced analytics, resulting in reduced direct operative costs, extended service life and safer skies. AVATAR’s digital twin (DT) model will act in parallel to the real structure and provides, where necessary, an early warning of operational behaviour that deviates from expected (simulated) behaviour contributing towards a predictive maintenance concept. Additionally, by recording the actual load spectrum that each air vehicle experiences during every flight, it will optimize the individual vehicle’s service life, which contributes towards safe and sustainable air mobility.The IoT sensing skin proposed by AVATAR is a key enabler for real-time critical operational information acquisition and connectivity between the physical aircraft and the digital counterpart through wireless communication. AVATAR DT platform will provide a seamless integration of IoT, big data and machine learning to collect, compute and predict. AVATAR will conform to the modern approach towards developing a digital twin based on different types of data and advanced analytical methods which eliminates the need for the real air vehicle and the virtual models to be directly connected and builds this connection through ML and AI. AVATAR contributes to the acceleration of digital transformation of air mobility, particularly in urban setting.AVATAR will validate the effectiveness of its innovative technologies first through wind tunnel testing, followed by real flight test of EVEKTOR’s ultralight Cobra airplane and Nordic Wing’s Astero electric unmanned aircraft. The consortium members consist of a good balance of industrial leads (Evektor, Nordic Wing and NTT), top-ranked universities (Imperial College London, Loughborough University, University of Luxembourg) and leading research institutes (Danish Technological Institute).AVATAR contributes to the acceleration of digital transformation of air mobility, particularly in urban setting by involving small aircraft manufacturer (Evektor, Nordic Wing), and world leading global technology services (NTT) providing the connectivity and communication link through intelligent analysis of data and AI leveraging machine learning-based developments. Evektor (EVE) is a leading European company involved with complete development of aircraft and aircraft components, including certification. Nordic Wing (NW) is in the fore front of manufacturing fixed-wing drone for mapping and surveying. AVATAR is technically lead by the SI&HM group at the department of Aeronautics, Imperial college London, and managed by Evektor.