Imagine hailing a taxi in Abu Dhabi and, instead of sitting in traffic, lifting off and flying above the city on your way to Dubai. It might sound futuristic, but Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) is much closer than many of us realize. Electric air taxis are being built, vertiports are being planned, and the UAE has committed to being among the first nations in the world to make urban air travel a reality.
What I find even more fascinating, and what our team at TII’s Autonomous Robotics Research Center (ARRC) works on every day, is everything happening behind the scenes. The aircraft may be the most visible part of this revolution, but they can’t operate safely without the invisible infrastructure that guides them. So the real question becomes: who designs the roads in the sky?
When you build a highway, you pour asphalt. When you build a highway in the sky, you build it out of data, algorithms, and communication links. It has to be invisible, dynamic, and safe, and it has to coexist with everything already flying above our cities. That invisible infrastructure is what we are creating, and it may make the UAE one of the first countries to deploy it comprehensively.
A digital twin of Abu Dhabi, and highways made of air
Our starting point is a question that sounds simple but isn’t: where, exactly, should an air taxi fly?
To answer it, we began with a systematic review of every factor that matters in designing an air corridor, from weather, no-fly zones and vertiport locations to population density, noise considerations and existing air traffic, and identified the most critical ones. Around those factors, we built something remarkable: a digital twin of Abu Dhabi. This living virtual model of the city is continuously fed with real-world data, from wind conditions to restricted airspace to where people live and gather.
On top of this, our digital twin runs an optimization framework that carves out conflict-free volumes of airspace connecting the city’s vertiports. These construct the so-called “air corridors” that air taxis will use to travel from A to B. Crucially, the corridors are not fixed. They adjust and reroute dynamically as real-time data flows in. If conditions change, the sky’s road network redraws itself.
To our knowledge, this is one of the first systems worldwide to implement such a comprehensive approach to dynamic corridor design. It is the kind of capability that will place the UAE at the forefront of an entirely new field.
Safety bubbles and reading the wind between skyscrapers
Designing corridors is only half the story. The other half is deciding how aircraft can share them safely.
Our safe separation work models and simulates how aircraft interact, both with each other and with static structures like buildings, to define aircraft-specific “safety bubbles”: the protective envelope of space each vehicle must maintain in any condition. From these models, we can determine precisely how many vehicles fit into a single corridor, both vertically and horizontally.
One of the most exciting frontiers in this work is the wind. Anyone who has walked between tall buildings on a breezy day knows that cities create their own turbulent microclimates. For a lightweight electric aircraft, those gusts matter enormously. The conventional way to calculate wind flow around buildings, computational fluid dynamics, is extraordinarily precise but painfully slow, often requiring hours of computation for just a few structures.
So, in collaboration with Caltech, we are developing an AI-based model that computes wind flow around the city’s buildings in real time. When stronger winds approach, this intelligence feeds directly into our corridor design software, and the corridors adjust before conditions become a risk. It is a beautiful example of how AI can compress hours of physics simulations into moments of data-driven prediction.
Teaching a new layer of traffic to talk to the old one
Air taxis will not fly in an empty sky. They will share airspace with commercial aviation, helicopters, and a growing population of drones, all coordinated by air traffic control systems that were never designed with hundreds of small electric aircraft in mind.
Our third focus, AAM-ATM integration, addresses exactly this. We study existing legacy systems and develop the protocols and procedures that allow this new layer of traffic to slot in safely, without overloading air traffic controllers. We are also evaluating direct vehicle-to-vehicle communication, which would let aircraft coordinate with each other for added safety and efficiency.
In fact, if there is one lesson from my career in robotics and networked systems, it is this: communication is the foundation everything else stands on. People take connectivity for granted, but in real operations it is almost always the bottleneck. For AAM, and especially for highly automated or remotely supervised aircraft, secure and resilient data links are what keep command, navigation, coordination, and emergency functions trustworthy at all times. That is why we design for multiple complementary communication technologies with built-in fallback strategies, rather than relying on any single network. In the sky, redundancy is not a luxury; it is the definition of safety.
What this means for how we move
I don’t believe AAM will replace cars, metros, or buses. It will complement them, adding an entirely new dimension to urban and regional mobility. Its greatest impact will come where time matters most: bypassing congested road networks, connecting regions more efficiently over longer distances, moving urgent cargo, and supporting emergency response when minutes save lives. The result is a layered, multimodal mobility ecosystem for both passengers and goods.
Getting there is as much a regulatory journey as a technological one. Aircraft must be certified, operational and maintenance standards defined, levels of autonomy validated, and questions of accountability answered. And for now, every country is assembling its own puzzle of systems and protocols. That is why the first air taxis will fly with pilots on board, along established visual flight
routes, with automation introduced feature by feature as the technology matures and regulations evolve. It is also why we work so closely with the UAE’s General Civil Aviation Authority, eVTOL manufacturers, and air navigation service providers, because getting this right requires everyone at the table.
The UAE’s moment
I believe the technological challenges ahead of us are all solvable. We can make AAM reliable, scalable, and efficient. The harder puzzle is thoughtful regulation, international harmonization and public trust. What encourages me is how seriously the UAE is taking this challenge, moving with real ambition and agility, and choosing to build the future rather than wait for it.
When the first air taxis begin carrying passengers across Abu Dhabi and Dubai, most people will look up and see a remarkable aircraft. I hope a few will also appreciate what they can’t see: the dynamic corridors, the safety bubbles, the real-time wind intelligence, and the resilient communication links holding it all together.
That invisible infrastructure is being built here, right now. And it will shape how the world moves for decades to come.