Soon, small air-taxis will supplement mobility in urban areas. With a high probability, these air-taxis will fly autonomous, and therefore high safety requirements are needed, especially since they also must operate well under bad weather conditions and over highly occupied urban areas.

In MIMO-Air, we will realise a demonstrator of an “Air Traffic Monitoring and Management System” (ATMMS) for flying platforms (e.g. for rescue- or transport helicopters, air-taxis, drones), consisting of the following main components:

• cognitive MIMO-Radar sensor for the detection of objects in the near field
• Radar-Postprocessor to control the cognitive radar modes for tracking and classification of objects,
• Ground control station (GCS) for visualisation and analysis of the traffic situation, and
• Bidirectional radio-datalink

The demonstrator will show how air traffic participants can be safely operated in un-controlled airspace.

OFFIS will develop the Ground Control Station (GCS), with a focus on the HMI concepts for remote pilots and air traffic operators. Our main objective is to optimise the situation awareness of the operator, and to provide the operator with exactly the information that is needed for the current task. Therefore, we will fuse the following data, to acquire a consistent description of the current situation: The three-dimensional image of the airspace provided by the MIMO-Radar system, digital maps, ADS-B data as well as weather information. The resulting flight traffic situation will be constantly analysed and visualised. To optimise the situation awareness of the operator, we will develop a method to measure the situation awareness, compare it with the current situation and in case of an insufficient operator situation awareness, we will provide warnings and display corrective measurements.