Abstract
Sense and avoid (SAA) remains one of the key enabling capabilities required for the safe airspace integration of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) into the global airspace system. Very little has been done to satisfy the technical and operational requirements necessary for allowing the unfettered access to civil airspace, domestically and internationally, projected to be needed by the Department of Defense and the civil/commercial market. Although standard organizations like RTCA and EUROCAE are focusing on the problem, the current lack of specific UAS standards is clearly slowing the progress of the defense and commercial development of this exploding technology. In addition, as it relates to SAA, the impact of the lack of a SAA focused “program of record” within one or all of the federal agencies and the associated funding that will be required and/or the lack of existing technical capability to move toward an autonomous solution believed by many to be necessary for complete, unfettered access to the NAS appears to be slowing progress.
The chapter entitled “Achieving Sense and Avoid for Unmanned Aircraft Systems: Assessing the Gaps for Science and Research” focuses on the efforts by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (OUSD) for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics (AT&L) to make progress in solving the SAA problem by the establishment of the SAA Science and Research Panel (SARP) in February 2011. The SARP consists of a panel of experts in technologies necessary to provide UAS with the ability to sense and avoid other aircraft. The panel’s primary purpose is to promote partnerships between the DoD and the broader academic and scientific community on UAS NAS Integration science and research initiatives in order to identify open questions and challenges in research and science efforts that must be addressed to provide UAS with an effectual SAA capability.
This chapter describes the methods of identifying and closing the science and research gaps that have been identified to date.
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References
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Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful to Mr. Dallas Brooks and Ms. Viva Austin for their leadership and vision in establishing the SARP. The authors recognize the dedication and technical contributions of the OUSD(AT&L) Airspace Integration IPT, the Systems Integration sub-IPT, Mr. Chris Jella, and the SARP in developing the SAA Blueprint from which the SAA Capability Definitions were derived.
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© 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Davis, K.D., Cook, S.P. (2015). Achieving Sense and Avoid for Unmanned Aircraft Systems: Assessing the Gaps for Science and Research. In: Valavanis, K., Vachtsevanos, G. (eds) Handbook of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9707-1_78
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9707-1_78
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