Skyroads partners with Urban Movement Labs to evaluate automated airspace management in Los Angeles

Sky­roads has announced a part­ner­ship with Urban Move­ment Labs (UML) to deploy data-informed, com­mu­ni­ty-dri­ven and tech-enabled mobil­i­ty in Los Ange­les.

The city invests over $13 bil­lion a year on trans­porta­tion projects alone and envi­sions a future with no traf­fic deaths, zero-emis­sion vehi­cles and half of all trav­el by walk­ing, cycling, micro-mobil­i­ty and tran­sit.

It is work­ing on 28 trans­porta­tion mega-projects for the 2028 Olympics, such as the Pur­ple Line Sub­way Exten­sion and the LA Riv­er Bike Path.

Sky­roads will col­lab­o­rate with the City, sev­er­al lead­ing urban air mobil­i­ty (UAM) oper­a­tors, OEMs, and oth­er reg­u­la­tors to eval­u­ate poten­tial appli­ca­tions of its auto­mat­ed air­space man­age­ment in Los Ange­les, built on a sim­i­lar deploy­ment already under­way at Munich in Ger­many.

In 2021 $7 bil­lion was invest­ed, with most funds direct­ed to air­craft man­u­fac­tur­ers. In addi­tion, $26.1 bil­lion in orders and let­ters of intent were sub­mit­ted for near­ly 7,000 air­craft.

Sky­roads inte­grates safe oper­a­tion of the next gen­er­a­tion of air­craft as described in its whitepa­per, ‘A Roadmap for Flight Automa­tion in Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty’, pub­lished in March.

Sky­roads chief com­mer­cial offi­cer Achim Kostron said: “Sky­roads is part­ner­ing with UML to bring togeth­er stake­hold­ers to cre­ate an action plan for AAM in cities like Los Ange­les.

“New meth­ods of mul­ti-agency coor­di­na­tion need to bring all rel­e­vant stake­hold­ers to the table to assure that all pre­con­di­tions for this new trans­port mode are met.”

UML exec­u­tive direc­tor Sam Mor­ris­sey added: “We are excit­ed to part­ner with Sky­roads, as this tech­nol­o­gy will assist in the man­age­ment of UAM oper­a­tions in a safe and effi­cient way.

“We wel­come Sky­roads to the UAM Part­ner­ship, con­tin­u­ing our efforts to lead the inte­gra­tion of aer­i­al trans­porta­tion in our cities with com­mu­ni­ties, the City of Los Ange­les and oth­er agency part­ners.”

In Novem­ber last year, Sky­roads com­plet­ed the first suc­cess­ful flight demon­stra­tion of its Traf­fic Man­age­ment Sys­tem pro­to­type at Tannheim in Ger­many, which show­cased the on-board flight guard­ing sys­tem or Blue­box, which com­mu­ni­cates with the drone’s flight con­trol com­put­er and the ground sys­tem via a cel­lu­lar net­work.