The Institute of Aerospace Technologies and its partner HandsOn Systems Ltd. have been awarded Eur 194,404 by the Malta Council for Science and Technology (MCST) to carry out a research project entitled SATMET: Situation Awareness and Traffic Management for Engineless Taxiing.
In current operations, aircraft move between the gate and the runway using their main engines. This method of taxiing is very inefficient and has several disadvantages, including noise and fuel emissions.
Therefore, significant research effort is currently being directed towards engineless aircraft taxiing.
SATMET will focus on engineless taxiing for the case where automated tugs (aka tow-trucks) are used to tow aircraft all the way from the gate to the runway (or vice-versa). The project will address two key challenges associated with this approach. The first will be to enhance crew situation awareness by detecting obstacles and taxiway boundaries along the path of an aircraft-tug pair in different weather conditions, using sensor fusion techniques. The second challenge will be to allocate tugs efficiently to arriving or departing aircraft and to determine the best route to be followed by each aircraft-tug pair in order to minimise energy costs and prevent conflicts.
This project will be carried out in collaboration with industry partner – an international technology company specialising in fleet management, amongst other areas – and will be led by Dr Ing. Jason Gauci and Prof. Ing. David Zammit-Mangion from the Institute of Aerospace Technologies.
A call for applications is currently open for a full-time Research Support Officer I/II to work on SATMET.
Further information about this call may be obtained from the or by sending an email to jason.gauci@um.edu.mt.
SATMET is being funded through the MCST Fusion R&I Programme and will run until the end of 2019.
