A Digital Twin Mixed-reality System for Testing Future Advanced Air Mobility Concepts: A Prototype

The UK Future Flight Vision and Roadmap defines how aviation in the UK is envisioned to develop by 2030. As part of the Future Flight demonstration segment, project HADO (High-intensity Autonomous Drone Operations) will develop, test, and deploy fully automated Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) operations at London Heathrow airport. The resource-demanding nature of real-world tests, however, suggests that developing and improving the reliability and efficiency of virtual environment-based testing methods is indispensable for the evolution of such operations. Nonetheless, developing a high-fidelity and real-time virtual environment that enables the safe, scalable, and sustainable development, verification, and validation of UAS operations remains a daunting task. Notably, the need to integrate physical and virtual elements with a high degree of correlation presents a significant challenge. Consequently, as part of the synthetic test environment work package within the HADO project, this paper proposes a Digital Twin (DT) system to enable mixed-reality tests in the context of autonomous UAS operations. This connects a physical world to its digital counterpart made up of five distinct layers and several digital elements to support enhanced mixed-reality functionality. The paper highlights how the static layers of the synthetic test environment are built, and presents a DT prototype that supports mixed-reality test capabilities. In particular, the ability to inject virtual obstacles into physical test environments is demonstrated, highlighting how the sharp boundaries between virtual environments and reality can be blurred for safe, flexible, efficient, and effective testing of UAS operations.