Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Supernal, Microdoft partner to advance technologies for Advanced Air Mobility

Supernal, a U.S.-based smart mobility service provider, announced a collaboration with Microsoft to advance autonomy, digital operations, and cloud integration technologies for the aviation industry by running Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) on the Microsoft cloud platform.

With Microsoft Azure, Supernal can leverage the flexibility and cloud computing power needed to run secure simulations at scale and accelerate its timeline to commercialization. Microsoft benefits from Supernal’s deep industry insights and experiences to enhance its customer-driven product innovation, including further enabling AAM companies to test and training simulations.

It’s just the initial phase of Supernal’s collaboration with Microsoft. During this phase, Microsoft will provide early Supernal access to Project AirSim, an artificial intelligence (AI)-first simulation platform. It is specially meant for safely building, testing, training, and validating autonomous aircraft transportation through simulation.

Project AirSim uses Azure to generate significant amounts of environment and sensory data to train machine-learning models that can simulate all phases of flight in various weather conditions. It also provides access to libraries of pre-trained AI models and planet-scale 3D environments representing urban and rural landscapes, as well as a partner ecosystem offering synthetic data generation to help accelerate aerial autonomy.

In addition, Supernal will use Microsoft’s HoloLens 2, a mixed-reality headset, to create augmented reality (AR) applications for future vehicle and manufacturing operations. AR resources could enable future AAM manufacturing and maintenance efficiencies by providing technicians unprecedented visual feedback during routine actions and bringing engineering support virtually on-site.

Microsoft is a critical ecosystem partner for Supernal to usher complete smart city infrastructure to markets, creating a seamless approach to the customer journey.

“Air transport is a key pillar in the democratization of mobility, connecting more people, goods, and places through safe flight experiences,” said Ulrich Homann, corporate vice president of Cloud + AI at Microsoft. “With the Microsoft Cloud, Supernal can unlock the computing power it takes to build, validate, and deploy electric air vehicles at scale, spurring the commercialization of advanced air mobility solutions.”