| Popis: |
Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) are being used extensively in the government, and private sectors to perform what were once manned missions. However, authorization to operate UAS unrestricted within organized airspace systems among civil air traffic remains virtually non-existent. A major technological and confidence barrier is the lack of an onboard Sense And Avoid (SAA) system capable of providing UAS with the ability to avoid collisions with other aircraft. The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has been developing an SAA system initially consisting of Electro-Optical (EO) sensors and a Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) for sensing non-cooperative and cooperative aircraft along with autonomous “avoid,” or maneuvering, logic. This system underwent flight test under AFRL’s Sense And Avoid Flight Test (SAAFT) program. This work has been continued under AFRL’s Multiple Intruder Autonomous Avoidance (MIAA) program, in which a surrogate SAA radar was added as a second non-cooperative aircraft detection sensor, and a Garmin Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) GDL-90 Universal Access Transceiver (UAT) was added as a second cooperative aircraft detection sensor. Furthermore, the autonomous avoidance algorithm, known as Jointly Optimal Conflict Avoidance (JOCA) was enhanced to deal effectively with avoidance of multiple aircraft. AFRL recently conducted a series of SAA flight tests to evaluate the performance of these systems during flight. The SAA hardware and software were installed in a variable stability Learjet which acted as a surrogate High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) UAS. |
