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Conduct research, development and testing to identify airspace operations requirements to enable large-scale visual and beyond visual line of sight UAS operations in the low-altitude airspace.
Conduct research, development and testing to identify airspace operations requirements to enable large-scale visual and beyond visual line of sight UAS operations in the low-altitude airspace.
This is a presentation for a Cisco Internet of Things (IoT) Systems Engineering Virtual Training (SEVT) event. The presentation provides an overview of the UTM concept, architecture, flight test events, and lessons learned. Networking hardware used in support of flight tests is also described.
Conduct research, development and testing to identify airspace operations requirements to enable large-scale visual and beyond visual line of sight UAS operations in the low-altitude airspace
NASA is working with Industry and FAA to enable beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) unmanned aerial systems (UAS) operations wherever it is needed. Prior to NASA involvement, the UAS Traffic Management (UTM) concept and architecture did not exist. Then, a system architecture to support UTM in the nation's airspace was pioneered by NASA and adopted externally. Now, NASA will be a dedicated partner with the ongoing Key Site Operational Evaluation in Texas. NASA is needed to help define how services can be approved and applied to enable BVLOS operations in the nation's airspace.
Presentation on Supplemental Data Service Providers from the UAS Traffic Management Concept of Operations
In concert with the continued advancement of a UAS traffic management system (UTM), the proposed uses of autonomous unmanned aerial systems (UAS) have become more prevalent in both the public and private sectors. To facilitate this anticipated growth, a reliable three-dimensional (3D) positioning, navigation, and mapping (PNM) capability will be required to enable operation of these platforms in challenging environments where global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) may not be available continuously. Especially, when the platform's mission requires maneuvering through different and difficult environments like outdoor opensky, outdoor under foliage, outdoor-urban and indoor, and may include transitions between these environments. There may not be a single method to solve the PNM problem for all environments. The research presented in this paper is a subset of a broader research effort, described in [1]. The research is focused on combining data from dissimilar sensor technologies to create an integrated navigation and mapping method that can enable reliable operation in both an outdoor and structured indoor environment. The integrated navigation and mapping design is utilizes a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver, an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), a monocular digital camera, and three short to medium range laser scanners. This paper describes specifically the techniques necessary to effectively integrate the monocular camera data within the established mechanization. To evaluate the developed algorithms a hexacopter was built, equipped with the discussed sensors, and both hand-carried and flown through representative environments. This paper highlights the effect that the monocular camera has on the aforementioned sensor integration scheme's reliability, accuracy and availability.
Educating California's Transportation Dept. (Caltrans) about Urban Air Mobility: what it is, how NASA is involved in this initiative, and plans for demonstrations (grand challenge).
To integrate unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in future large-scale deployments, a new wireless communication paradigm, namely, the cellular-connected UAV has recently attracted interest. However, the line-of-sight dominant air-to-ground channels along with the antenna pattern of the cellular ground base stations (GBSs) introduce critical interference issues in cellular-connected UAV communications. In particular, the complex antenna pattern and the ground reflection (GR) from the down-tilted antennas create both coverage holes and patchy coverage for the UAVs in the sky, which leads to unreliable connectivity from the underlying cellular network. To overcome these challenges, in this paper, we propose a new cellular architecture that employs an extra set of co-channel antennas oriented towards the sky to support UAVs on top of the existing down-tilted antennas for ground user equipment (GUE). To model the GR stemming from the down-tilted antennas, we propose a path-loss model, which takes both antenna radiation pattern and configuration into account. Next, we formulate an optimization problem to maximize the minimum signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) of the UAVs by tuning the up-tilt (UT) angles of the up-tilted antennas. Since this is an NP-hard problem, we propose a genetic algorithm (GA) based heuristic method to optimize the UT angles of these antennas. After obtaining the optimal UT angles, we integrate the 3GPP Release-10 specified enhanced inter-cell interference coordination (eICIC) to reduce the interference stemming from the down-tilted antennas. Our simulation results based on the hexagonal cell layout show that the proposed interference mitigation method can ensure higher minimum SIRs for the UAVs over baseline methods while creating minimal impact on the SIR of GUEs.
New categories of missions and vehicle types, such as drone delivery services, on-demand air taxi, and high-altitude long-endurance (HALE) vehicles are being proposed to operate using a novel, highly automated information exchange infrastructure and a community-based, cooperative traffic management concept. Collectively, these new operations are called Extensible Traffic Management (xTM). As these xTM vehicles become more prevalent, their operations will increasingly overlap with existing conventional aircraft and with each other. In order to seamlessly co-exist with current conventional aircraft operations, new coordination procedures, tools and services will be needed to integrate xTM into the future National Airspace System (NAS). In our prior work, we have identified a set of use cases for xTM interactions with air traffic control (ATC), categorized across different xTM operations based on trigger events. Events consisted of ones such as nominal xTM vehicle transition into the ATC environment or an off-nominal emergency landing situation. In this paper, we have extended the prior work to identify commonalities in the coordination procedures across xTM, as well as differences that are specific to the individual xTM operations. The overall results showed that two types of xTM-ATC interactions were prevalent: 1) xTM vehicles transitioning between xTM and ATC operational environments; 2) xTM vehicles being allowed to continue xTM operations in areas that are normally controlled by ATC. The results also suggested that emergency and rare off-nominal events may need specialized procedures for each vehicle type. The overall results suggest that there is a pathway to define a common method of handling and integrating diverse xTM operations in the future NAS, but there need to be procedures for individualized handling of xTM vehicles in infrequent, safety-critical events.
Agenda - Wildfire Impacts - Needs Assessment - Prior and Current Research - ACERO Approach - Summary and Discussion
NASA is exploring a proposed new operating mode called digital flight, a complement to VFR and IFR. Under digital flight rules, the aircraft operator would use automation, traffic awareness, information services, and cooperative practices to ensure separation from other flights in VMC and IMC. The presentation describes how digital flight safely increases airspace access and operating flexibility for qualified operators, and its harmonizing approach to emerging future operations.
This is a short architectural note for a critical component of safely scaling drone operations. The primary motivation for this note is to collect language and terminology around the Discovery and Synchronization Service (DSS) as it is currently implemented for Uncrewed Aircraft System (UAS) Traffic Management. The major driver for this document was frequent miscommunication about DSS. Often there have been multiple informed and invested stakeholders in the same room making statements about “multiple DSSs” and each of them meaning something slightly different.
The Discovery and Synchronization service (DSS) has implemented some reasonable technical controls that help improve security and there are very few technical findings. The use of Docker and Kubernetes helps simplify the deployment process, and the DSS uses mutual TLS (mTLS) to connect. Much of the security risk across the DSS is a factor of its nature, a distributed environment that relies on all members to secure their parts correctly. As such, the DSS team should attempt to emphasize security controls that reduce complexity for securing entities’ Cockroach DB (CRDB) instances properly and improve coordination among DSS members for things like security patching, incident response, detecting, and removing bad actors. The DSS team must recognize that operating a DSS instance securely will require a combination of technical and procedural controls. Each DSS entity must configure their instance properly and follow standard operating procedures to ensure that the DSS service is secure.
This is a presentation that describes the UAS Traffic Management Approach to an alternate means of compliance with 91.113 right of way regulations. UTM is an "air traffic management" ecosystem for uncontrolled operations.
The disaster response domain has experienced an increased focus in recent years due to the rise in number and scale of events, lessons learned from past experience, and emerging technologies that make possible a more coordinated and effective response. As part of this focus, JAXA and NASA have been collaborating on the integration of manned and unmanned aircraft in support of disaster response operations through integrated testing of their respective mission planning and optimization system (Disaster Relief Aircraft Information Sharing Network, or D-NET) and an automated UAS traffic management system (e.g., UTM). In 2018, JAXA and NASA jointly participated in a large-scale disaster drill in Japan where the integration of systems was successfully demonstrated through real-time data exchanges, visualization, and decision making as part of the coordinated airspace management of a manned helicopter in VFR conditions and unmanned small UAS operating in common areas. This work details a flight test consisting of two flights that were conducted December 2019 near the Chofu Aerodrome in Tokyo, which focused on the evaluation of pilots operating under Visual Flight Rules (VFR) communicating through D-NET and sharing intent and position information within UTM. This work contributes to defining the necessary requirements for digital coordination between manned and unmanned operations. UTM requires the use of operation volumes, which are spatial and temporal volumes that encompass UAS flight trajectories and account for technical performance errors and deviations due to disturbances (e.g., wind). A series of flights, representing different missions, used landmark-based operation volumes and conformance of the aircraft to those operation volumes were tracked within UTM. Experienced disaster response helicopter pilots provided insight on the development of the operation plans and their usability during disaster response operations. Results from the flight test supported the suggested benefits of using landmarks for planning and positional awareness and highlighted the need for future research in advanced visualization capabilities to support operations that consider both system constraints and flight deck/airspace management interaction.
An overview of UTM (UAS (Unmanned Aircraft Systems) Traffic Management) and UAM (Urban Air Mobility).
This is a presentation at the UAS TAAC conference. This is an invited session and will focus on UTM Briefing on field test results from TCL 2 and plans for TCL 3.