ABOUT PROJECT ORION
Project Orion is a NASA-funded research effort focused on next-generation UTM and autonomous cooperative airspace. The project develops technologies that support safe, scalable, and coordinated operations in dense and dynamic environments, while also building the real-time validation infrastructure needed to test and evaluate those systems under realistic operational conditions.
Our Mission
Orion’s mission is to advance the technologies and infrastructure required for next-generation UTM and future autonomous cooperative airspace. As airspace systems become more complex, dense, and autonomous, they will require new methods for coordination, evaluation, and operational testing.
Orion is designed to help meet that need. The project explores how autonomous systems can operate more safely and effectively in environments where timing, interaction, communication quality, and evolving context all matter. This includes not only developing new technical capabilities, but also creating the means to validate them credibly.
The Challenge
Traditional development and testing methods are often not enough for future high-density autonomous airspace. Many critical behaviors only emerge when multiple vehicles interact under real constraints such as limited observability, dynamic obstacles, communication degradation, and rapidly changing mission context.
To enable future cooperative airspace at scale, it is not enough to propose new autonomy methods in isolation. Those systems must also be tested in ways that reflect the realities of operations. Orion addresses both sides of that problem: the autonomy challenge and the validation challenge.
What Makes Orion Distinctive
Orion is not only focused on what future cooperative airspace systems should do, but on how they can be tested and developed credibly. Its distinguishing strength is the infrastructure it brings to that problem.
This includes:
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Real-time distributed simulation
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Operational digital twins
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Evaluation under dense and dynamic scenarios
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Testing under degraded communications and other operational constraints
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Support for autonomy, coordination, and mission-relevant validation
This combination enables Orion to serve as both a research platform for next-generation UTM and a foundation for more realistic autonomy evaluation.
Meet the Team
Our multidisciplinary team has years of experience in machine learning, robotics, aerospace, human factors, and hardware.
Mehrnaz Sabet
Principal Investigator & Technical Lead
Mehrnaz Sabet is the Principal Investigator and technical lead of Project Orion, a NASA-funded effort at Cornell advancing next-generation UTM and autonomous cooperative airspace. She leads the project’s technical vision, system architecture, and multidisciplinary team across real-time simulation, field validation, autonomy software, vehicle integration, and live operational testing. Under her leadership, Orion has grown into a platform for developing and rigorously evaluating cooperative autonomy in dense, dynamic, and safety-critical airspace. Her work focuses not only on advancing new airspace capabilities, but on building the infrastructure needed to test, stress, and mature them under realistic operational conditions.
Contributors
Aaron Babu
Ethan Baker
Marcus Lee
Owen Sorber
Aspen Smith
Neha Sunkara
Daniel Tang
Samuel Rebello
Roopak Srinivasan
Takuma Osaka
Yuxuan Liu
Uday Tyagi
Joshua Park
Mericel Tao
Rushil Sambangi
Kalyan Suvarna
OUR JOURNEY
2024
Orion launched as a NASA-funded effort focused on AI-enabled future airspace systems.
2025
Core simulation, autonomy, and testing capabilities established and field testing began.
2026
Field testing, expansion of validation infrastructure for cooperative airspace and technical outputs.
NEXT
Continued development of next-generation UTM technologies, real-time evaluation methods, and broader collaborative testing capabilities.