Global Urban Air Mobility challenge gives cities chance to offer virtual VTOL aircraft flight simulations in 2021

A glob­al ini­tia­tive has been launched to give three cities the chance to win a VTOL flight sim­u­la­tion hub and a Dig­i­tal Twin of their city, in order for them to test and eval­u­ate Urban Air Mobil­i­ty sce­nar­ios.

Known as the ARCH UAM Glob­al Chal­lenge and organ­ised by AV Liv­ing Lab and Nervtech, the pur­pose of the project is to invite cities to work togeth­er and offer their inhab­i­tants the oppor­tu­ni­ty to explore and expe­ri­ence fly­ing in a VTOL air­craft in an urban envi­ron­ment.

Appli­ca­tions opened on Decem­ber 10th, and the final dead­line to sub­mit entries is Feb­ru­ary 28th, 2021. The chal­lenge is open to cities and non-city enti­ties with city gov­ern­ment endorse­ment. Non-city enti­ties can be led by acad­e­mia, NGOs, accelerators/incubators, and pub­lic or pri­vate orga­ni­za­tions.

A judg­ing pan­el, which con­sists of indus­try experts from Air­bus, Daim­ler and Italde­sign, will then choose and announce the top 10 final­ists on March 31st, 2021. The three win­ners will be revealed on May 31st, with the flight sim­u­la­tor to be deployed in each of the three cities by Sep­tem­ber 31st, 2021.

Daniel Avdag­ic, CEO and Co-Founder of AV Liv­ing Lab, said: “This chal­lenge will allow vir­tu­al­ly fly­ing in megac­i­ties by the end of 2021, final­ly mak­ing the Jet­son era a real­i­ty. When it comes to Urban Air Mobil­i­ty, more and more cities are excit­ed about its arrival, how­ev­er, fly­ing cars are not yet avail­able.

“This makes it hard for city lead­ers, pol­i­cy­mak­ers, archi­tects, mobil­i­ty providers and cit­i­zens to expe­ri­ence and under­stand how it will change the way peo­ple and car­go will move. It will save the time lost due to traf­fic jams and have a pos­i­tive impact on the envi­ron­ment.

“We believe we have the solu­tion — cities can make vir­tu­al UAM fly­ing a real­i­ty with our VTOL Flight Sim­u­la­tion Hub. This is why we have decid­ed to launch this chal­lenge, and help peo­ple dis­cov­er how fly­ing in the future will look like — today.”

The ARCH UAM Flight Sim­u­la­tor is a full-size cab­in and has all the func­tion­al­i­ties of a fly­ing VTOL air­craft, with­out the need to leave the ground.

Designed to pro­vide an immer­sive and high­ly real­is­tic expe­ri­ence, it has adjustable and recon­fig­urable com­po­nents, a ful­ly elec­tric 4DOF motion sys­tem, bio­met­ri­cal and phys­i­o­log­i­cal sen­sors and a auto­mat­ed train­ing and instruc­tion process.

It also sup­ports every­thing from route opti­mi­sa­tion, test­ing the fear of fly­ing and over­all com­fort, noise lev­els and the impact of sus­tain­able fly­ing in urban areas.

Addi­tion­al­ly, using this tech­nol­o­gy rep­re­sents impor­tance for Urban plan­ners as it allows them to face and ful­ly under­stand users’ expe­ri­ence, enabling them to offer their cities seam­less, con­nect­ed, inte­grat­ed mul­ti­modal­i­ty in sus­tain­able envi­ron­ments.

Anoth­er oppor­tu­ni­ty also aris­es for the mas­ter cre­ators of traf­fic plans as well, as it helps them move a large mass of peo­ple and car­go in megac­i­ties from one point to anoth­er much faster and smoother.

Matej Ven­gust, CEO at Nervtech, added: “To accel­er­ate the devel­op­ment of Urban Air Mobil­i­ty, we want to take it to the next lev­el by bring­ing a real-life vTOL sim­u­la­tion demon­stra­tor to the peo­ple.”

Appli­cant cities will be accessed accord­ing to the fol­low­ing cri­te­ria:

• How ready is your city for Urban Air Mobil­i­ty?
• Do you have the ded­i­cat­ed team and space to estab­lish a Urban Air Mobil­i­ty Flight Sim­u­la­tion Hub?
• Have you already, or are you will­ing to estab­lish a Urban Air Mobil­i­ty ‘City­Lab’ in your city/region?
• What is your capac­i­ty to part­ner with and per­form Pilot/Proof of Con­cepts to make Urban Air Mobil­i­ty bet­ter for cit­i­zens?

AV Liv­ing Lab is a tech­nol­o­gy start­up which focus­es on the devel­op­ment, pilot test­ing, and imple­men­ta­tion of new tech­nolo­gies and busi­ness mod­els in its real-life City­Lab envi­ron­ment. 

It also organ­is­es the City as a Lab Sum­mit, where lead­ing brands share their new mobil­i­ty inno­va­tion work and the com­pa­ny has suc­cess­ful­ly imple­ment­ed more than 30 proofs-of-con­cept, includ­ing clients such as Daim­ler, Google, Toy­ota, and Volk­swa­gen Group.

While Nervtech is a high-tech R&D com­pa­ny spe­cial­is­ing in vehi­cle sim­u­la­tor tech­nolo­gies in the fields of bio­met­ric and cog­ni­tive dri­ver eval­u­a­tion, deep machine learn­ing and data inte­gra­tion. It is an advanced tool for dri­ver and oper­a­tor train­ing in vari­ety of dri­ving sce­nar­ios.

For more infor­ma­tion about the ARCH UAM Flight Chal­lenge, and to find out how to apply, vis­it www.arch.aero