The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) has awarded a team of researchers from the University of California campuses at Merced, Berkeley and Davis a two-year grant to simulate urban air mobility in the San Francisco area, and to draft regulations for this highly complex form of travel.
The guidelines and best practices the team creates could help get advanced air mobility — featuring flying buses, air taxis and drone deliveries — off the ground around the state.
Raja Sengupta, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley who specializes in systems and transportation engineering and directs the CalUnmanned Research Lab, is the project’s lead principal investigator (PI). Brandon Stark, director of the University of California Center of Excellence on Unmanned Aircraft System Safety and assistant adjunct professor of mechanical engineering at UC Merced, is a co-lead PI, along with UC Berkeley researchers Mark Hansen and Susan Shaheen, in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Alexandre Bayen and Claire Tomlin, in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, and Seongkyu Lee, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UC Davis.
Keep reading this article at universityofcalifornia.edu.