The ePlane Company partners with NVIDIA to build a digital twin of its electric air taxis
The eVTOL maker noted that it is building India’s first electric air taxi using NVIDIA Omniverse libraries.
Electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft maker, The ePlane Company, on Thursday said it will create a digital twin of its e200x using NVIDIA Omniverse Libraries.
NVIDIA Omniverse Libraries is a collection of software development kits, application programming interfaces, and frameworks designed to build and operate 3D, AI-enabled simulation applications.
The Chennai-based company also said that it will use the NVIDIA IGX platform as the onboard computing platform to host a variety of critical applications. The platform is a computing solution designed specifically for mission-critical Edge AI applications.
This collaboration is expected to help with validation—a critical challenge in the aviation sector. Physical testing of specific cases, such as extreme weather, sensor failures, or collision scenarios are costly and risky.
The e200x digital twin will enable the team at ePlane to fly millions of kilometres virtually and train its algorithms for complex real-world scenarios before the aircraft even takes flight.
“We are not just building an aircraft; we are building an ecosystem. Collaborating with NVIDIA allows us to blur the line between the digital and the physical. By validating our flight operations suite in NVIDIA Omniverse, we are effectively pushing the limits of the aircraft thousands of times in simulation so that we never have to in reality. This level of rigour is what defines sovereign aerospace capability,” said Prof. Satya Chakravarthy, Founder and CTO, The ePlane Company.
Additionally, the computational intensity of simulations requires high-performance computing infrastructure. The digital twin can, instead, serve as a predictive analytics engine, mirroring the configuration of the actual aircraft components to predict maintenance needs long before failure occurs, the company noted.
“India’s AI startup ecosystem is primed for acceleration, driven by exceptional technical talent and global ambition,” said Tobias Halloran, Director of EMEAI Startups and Venture Capital at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA is accelerating this momentum by giving founders direct access to accelerated computing, scalable AI infrastructure, and programs like NVIDIA Inception for startups and the NVIDIA VC Alliance—helping startups scale faster and build for global markets.”
Edited by Jyoti Narayan