Researchers presented hundreds of papers at the 2021 Institute of Navigation (ION) GNSS+ conference, which took place virtually and in person Sept. 20-24 in St. Louis, Missouri. The following five presentations focused on the challenges of urban navigation. The emergence and development of advanced technologies and vehicle types has created a growing demand for the introduction of new forms of flight operations. These new and increasingly complex operational paradigms, such as Advanced and Urban Air Mobility (AAM/UAM) present regulatory authorities and the aviation community with several design and implementation challenges - particularly for highly autonomous vehicles. An overarching and daunting task is finding methods to integrate these emerging operations without compromising safety or disrupting traditional airspace operations. Predictive risk mitigation is critical to meeting this challenge. The authors of this study focus on the development and testing of a prognostic service aimed at estimating the quality of GNSS performance for an autonomous aircraft in complex environments. Flight operations would be able to factor into pre-flight and in-flight route planning an estimate of GNSS quality, thereby predicting poor or unacceptable navigation system performance. The authors provide methodologies for producing quality estimates, and provide results for selected simulation and flight-test cases.
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