Supernal to advance AAM cloud technology with Microsoft

Super­nal yes­ter­day announced a col­lab­o­ra­tion with Microsoft to advance auton­o­my, dig­i­tal oper­a­tions and cloud inte­gra­tion tech­nolo­gies for advanced air mobil­i­ty (AAM) on the Microsoft cloud plat­form.

With Microsoft Azure, Super­nal can lever­age the flex­i­bil­i­ty and cloud com­put­ing pow­er to run secure sim­u­la­tions at scale and accel­er­ate its time­line to com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion. Microsoft ben­e­fits from Supernal’s indus­try expe­ri­ence to enhance its cus­tomer-dri­ven prod­uct inno­va­tion, includ­ing fur­ther enabling AAM com­pa­nies to test and train sim­u­la­tions.

Hyundai Motor Group pres­i­dent and Super­nal CEO Dr Jai­won Shin com­ment­ed: “In ush­er­ing in a new fron­tier of trans­porta­tion with AAM, Super­nal has an oblig­a­tion to ensure safe and secure deploy­ment of eVTOL vehi­cles. We are pleased to col­lab­o­rate with Microsoft in advanc­ing AAM autonomous sys­tems and infor­ma­tion-shar­ing.”

Dur­ing the ini­tial phase of the col­lab­o­ra­tion, Microsoft will pro­vide Super­nal ear­ly access to Project Air­Sim, an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence sim­u­la­tion plat­form, to safe­ly build, test, train and val­i­date autonomous air­craft trans­porta­tion through sim­u­la­tion.

Project Air­Sim uses Azure to gen­er­ate sig­nif­i­cant amounts of envi­ron­ment and sen­so­ry data to train machine learn­ing mod­els that sim­u­late all phas­es of flight and vari­able weath­er pat­terns.

Project Air­Sim pro­vides libraries of pre­trained AI mod­els and plan­et-scale 3D envi­ron­ments rep­re­sent­ing urban and rur­al land­scapes, as well as a part­ner ecosys­tem offer­ing syn­thet­ic data gen­er­a­tion to help accel­er­ate aer­i­al auton­o­my.

In addi­tion, Super­nal is look­ing to use the Microsoft HoloLens 2 head­set to cre­ate aug­ment­ed real­i­ty (AR) appli­ca­tions for future vehi­cle and man­u­fac­tur­ing oper­a­tions to enable effi­cien­cies in future AAM man­u­fac­tur­ing and main­te­nance by pro­vid­ing tech­ni­cians visu­al feed­back dur­ing rou­tine actions.

Microsoft cor­po­rate vice pres­i­dent of Cloud and AI Ulrich Homann added: “Air trans­port is a key pil­lar in the democ­ra­ti­sa­tion of mobil­i­ty, con­nect­ing more peo­ple, goods and places through safe flight expe­ri­ences.

“With the Microsoft Cloud, Super­nal can unlock the com­put­ing pow­er it takes to build, val­i­date, and deploy elec­tric air vehi­cles at scale, spurring the com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion of advanced air mobil­i­ty solu­tions.”

Last Octo­ber, BAE Sys­tems and Super­nal agreed to design and devel­op the flight con­trol com­put­er for Supernal’s eVTOL vehi­cle, a light­weight and com­pact fly-by-wire sys­tem for eVTOL vehi­cles that will enable safe, effi­cient, and com­fort­able flight.

Two days before, Hyundai Motor Group’s eVTOL depart­ment chose Hon­ey­well to devel­op avion­ics sys­tems to explore inte­gra­tion of its Anthem flight deck into its fly­ing taxi, which is set to enter com­mer­cial ser­vice in 2028.