Advanced Air Mobility Safety Challenges: Case Study on Visual SLAM for Enhanced Navigation in Unmanned Aviation Integration

The rapid emergence of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) introduces critical safety challenges in integrating Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs) into shared and increasingly congested airspace. Safe and efficient operations require robust solutions in navigation, communication, and collision avoidance to enable the coexistence of manned and unmanned aircraft. This paper investigates key safety concerns in AAM, including airspace management, real-time situational awareness, and regulatory compliance, with a particular focus on navigation safety. To address these challenges, we present a case study on the application of Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (Visual SLAM) for UAS navigation. Leveraging onboard cameras and AI-based feature tracking, Visual SLAM offers a resilient alternative to GPS, especially in GPS-denied or signal-degraded environments. Our evaluation across multiple operational scenarios demonstrates the effectiveness of this approach in improving navigation accuracy, obstacle detection and avoidance, and autonomous flight safety within AAM ecosystems. Furthermore, we explore the integration of Visual SLAM with Air Traffic Management (ATM) and UAS Traffic Management (UTM) systems, emphasizing interoperability and computational efficiency as critical enablers of large-scale deployment.