Description

This is a project called "Project Stingray" that I designed for "Hosei University Urban Air Mobility Laboratory"

3D Modeling and Rendering are all done in Fusion 360 with bit of retouching.

By google translation from their homepage

The explosive growth of the world population in the 21st century accelerates urbanization on a global scale, personal mobility represented by automobiles has not been widespread with innovation of electrification and IT conversion. However, the planned road infrastructure in large cities reaches the limit, the traffic congestion in the city is serious, the loss of this energy and time value is huge. Also, in large cities, it has a high-rise structure and it is inevitably required to move three-dimension, access by the elevator from the ground surface is extremely inefficient including in the case of disasters. Personal air mobility (ride freely going and coming freely in space) as a form of transport of such a near future city (like a science-fiction film) is there, but there are many technical problems and it is realized It is not. Airplanes and helicopters that are prevalent as spatially moving vehicles are designed to move at high speed over controlled airspace without obstacles and are in the first place matched with the demands of the personal urban air transportation method mentioned above not.

Nowadays, unmanned aerial vehicles (drone), which are rapidly industrializing in aerial photography and transportation of goods, are stabilized by multiple high power electric compact propellers, high energy density batteries, ultra small attitude control sensors by MEMS technology, etc. We realized vertical take-off and landing, levitation, flight, we are expanding its application range with automatic control by IoT. And by utilizing this drone technology for rides of personnel transport size, feasibility of personal air mobility has come to light. These are called Urban Air Mobility (Urban Air Traffic, UAM), attracted attention as a next-generation personal transportation means such as air taxis, and large-scale upfront investment including Airbus and other existing aircraft manufacturers has started all over the world I will. The space that this UAM flying is exclusively the valley of a building and the sky over the houses, it is a vehicle that can not be handled by the aeronautical law targeting conventional aircraft, and there are many problems to be solved for realization. However, UAM is a category of new vehicles that appeared next to automobiles, railways, ships, and aircraft, as a high-efficiency means of point to point without low noise, zero emissions, no runway, no control skills, no traffic infrastructure, There is a possibility to revamp the paradigm of transportation and logistics, and economic effects are also immeasurable.

We established this laboratory for the purpose of investigation, research and development of next generation air transportation based on such UAM. This laboratory is a task to realize the UAM society, a highly efficient operation system including collision avoidance in vehicles flying in urban space including aircraft, correspond to weather conditions, passengers at the time of accident occurrence As well as researchers and relevant ministries and agencies in related fields and local governments and manufacturers who are beneficiaries for information exchange and knowledge sharing for safety features on the ground, aircraft specifications to ensure economy, motors and battery performance etc We aim to be. As for the electric propulsion unit which is one of the key technologies of UAM, practical investigation with relevant ministries and agencies and researchers through electricization of the new small aircraft category LSA (Light Sport Aircraft) and introduction of categories into Japan I will advance my research. In addition, we will evaluate practical possibilities from the marketing field on new transportation and logistics systems utilizing UAM.

In addition to evaluating the feasibility of UAM, we believe that the institute's efforts are not only to evaluate the feasibility of UAM, but also to think that it will greatly contribute to the shortage of aircraft design and development engineers and the development of young responders to the shortage of pilots, and the findings and results We hope to lead the next generation air legislation and environment building.

June 2018

Hosei University Graduate School Urban Air Mobility Laboratory

Director Mikawa Manabu (Professor of Mechanical Engineering Department, Hosei University)