Airio to develop flightpath navigation system for Walle Mobility’s first eVTOL aircraft services in Italy

Airio will devel­op intel­li­gent flight paths for the first eVTOL air­craft ser­vices in Italy, as part of a new part­ner­ship with Walle Mobil­i­ty.

This will be done using Airi­o’s Intel­li­gent Flight­path Nav­i­ga­tion Sys­tem, which con­sists of sophis­ti­cat­ed and pro­pri­etary math­e­mat­i­cal algo­rithms to search, eval­u­ate and cre­ate paths for every vehi­cle oper­at­ing in a shared, low-alti­tude air­space. It then shares the crit­i­cal infor­ma­tion with the on-board oper­a­tor, a ground-based fleet man­ag­er and oth­er vehi­cles in the net­work.

Addi­tion­al­ly, each flight path must con­sid­er fac­tors like city archi­tec­ture, ground and sky traf­fic, vehi­cle capa­bil­i­ties, weath­er and even wildlife. Airio’s tech­nol­o­gy auto­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­ates flight paths by inte­grat­ing these types of infor­ma­tion into real-time auto­mat­ed flight­path assign­ments.

“Airio is one of the ide­al part­ners for air­space man­age­ment.” says Domeni­co Gagliar­di, founder and CEO of Walle Mobil­i­ty. “Imag­ine how to best han­dle not just 10, but 100 air­craft in flight.  Thanks to Airio’s soft­ware, we will be able to cre­ate intel­li­gent flight paths for our fleet. 

“In fact, the route instruc­tions are pro­vid­ed direct­ly to the air­craft, and are con­tin­u­ous­ly mon­i­tored for a pre­cise tra­jec­to­ry self-cor­rec­tion.”

Airio aims to make flight­path rout­ing and sched­ul­ing smarter, by build­ing con­flict-free flight paths. Each vehi­cle is assigned a dynam­ic, inde­pen­dent path­way which helps to reduce the pro­cess­ing depen­den­cy on sen­sor-based avoid­ance and nav­i­ga­tion­al sys­tems. Path­way instruc­tions are deliv­ered direct­ly to the vehi­cle, and con­tin­u­ous­ly mon­i­tored for pre­cise tra­jec­to­ry auto-cor­rec­tion.

The com­pa­ny recent­ly announced a sim­i­lar part­ner­ship with Varon Vehi­cles and David Rus­sell, Airi­o’s CTO, was part of Varon Vehi­cles’ think tanks about the imple­men­ta­tion of urban air mobil­i­ty in Latin Amer­i­ca — which took place last year.

Michael Liquori, CEO of Airio, said: “Airio is excit­ed to join the ecosys­tem of com­pa­nies that Walle Mobil­i­ty has brought togeth­er. Domeni­co and his team have real­ly tak­en a lead­er­ship role in this emerg­ing indus­try, and their vision for safe, smart and mod­ern urban trans­porta­tion is tru­ly excit­ing.”

Walle Mobil­i­ty’s goal is to specif­i­cal­ly tar­get interur­ban routes with­in 50km and offer routes as a shut­tle trans­port ser­vice via eVTOL air­craft. Its roadmap will see the com­pa­ny mock up a ver­ti­port design lat­er this year, with pub­lic demo days start­ing from 2022–23.

The con­struc­tion of the first ver­ti­port is planned for 2024, as well as the recruit­ment and train­ing of the coun­try’s first pilot. The launch of Italy’s first eVTOL air­craft ser­vice will then launch a year lat­er in 2025.

It says it wants to rad­i­cal­ly trans­form pas­sen­ger trans­port in high-den­si­ty areas and con­nect strate­gic points of cities or tourist areas with impor­tant traf­fic nodes such as air­ports and rail­way sta­tions. Poten­tial cities of inter­est include Milan, Naples, Rome, Turin and Venice.

Walle Mobil­i­ty’s lat­est agree­ment with Airio is the sec­ond one it has announced in the eVTOL mar­ket. Ear­li­er this year, the Ital­ian start­up con­firmed it will be work­ing with Jaunt Air Mobil­i­ty to devel­op the first routes as ear­ly as 2026. Jaun­t’s Jour­ney eVTOL air­craft will also be used for the first pas­sen­ger-car­ry­ing ser­vices. eVTOL Insights also spoke to Walle’s Mar­co Pugliese in a pod­cast about the com­pa­ny’s vision for the mar­ket.