AirTwinX: A High-Fidelity Digital Twin for Advanced Air Mobility with Ray Tracing

Ensuring the safety and reliability of emerging Advanced Aerial Mobility (AAM) systems requires wireless communication to provide real-time monitoring and control information to ground stations. This greatly depends on the quality of the wireless links during aerial transit. In this demonstration, we present AirTwinX, designed to emulate flight control of flying vehicles while generating high-fidelity, context-aware models for air-to-air (AA) and air-to-ground (AG) communication links. Using GPU-accelerated ray tracing, AirTwinX can predict the quality of wireless links with near real-time updates based on the environmental geometry observed during flight. This data is then used to guide autonomous control decision-making. Additionally, the vehicle control toolchain employed in this work is based on software-in-the-loop (SITL) emulation of a commercial flight controller, enabling seamless translation of control policies from simulation to real-world hardware.