Unmanned Aircraft System- Sense And Avoid System

The increase in the use of the Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) has brought about one major problem which is the safety of our National Airspace System (NAS) with a lot of near missses with Manned Aircraft System (Gilbert, 2015). In order to fix this problem, the National Aeronautics Space Agency (NASA), the Federal Aviation Adminstration (FAA), General Atomic Aeronautical System (GA-ASI) and Honeywell international Inc have successfully demonstrated a proof of the concept Sense And Avoid (SAA) System marking milestones to inform the development of standards and regulations to safely integrate UAS in the NAS (Conner, 2015).

The SAA System was integrated into NASA Ikhana research aircraft, a civilian version of the company's Predator B and the test flight evaluated the SAA system in a wide variety of collision avoidance and self separation between two remotely pilot aircraft and various manned aircraft (Conner, 2015).

The parts that made up the SAA System were GA-ASI's air to air radar system, Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B), a Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) II, a Sense and Avoid processor that is hosting Honeywell's sensor fusion software  and algorithms that would provide recommendations on how to stay clear of the traffic an UAS would encounter in commercial airspace (Van Wagenen, 2015).

The researchers evaluated three self-separation display and algorithms and their ability to effectively inform the UAS pilot of nearby traffic and help resolve conflict in a timely manner. The initial test were successful showing both the automatic avoidance system as well as pilot in the loop self separation functionality for the UAS. The crew had 170 flight encounter and collected over 50 hours of data with noticeable accomplishment (Conner, 2015) .

In conclusion, these tests are still on going and the success of these tests will help develop a technical standard for the SAA System for the UAS in our NAS in the nearest future.

References:
Conner, M. (2015, August 31). NASA, FAA, Industry Conduct Initial Sense-and-Avoid Test. Retrieved April 2, 2016 from http://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/Features/acas_xu_paves_the_way.html
Gilbert, D. (2015, August 3). JFK airport drone collision scare: UAVs spotted in near miss with incoming passenger planes. Retrieved April 2, 2016 from
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/jfk-airport-drone-collision-scare-uavs-spotted-near-miss-incoming-passenger-planes-1513801
Van Wagenen, J. (2015, July 6). NASA, Industry Fight Test UAS Sense-and-Avoid Technology. Retrieved April 2, 2016 from
http://www.aviationtoday.com/av/commercial/NASA-Industry-Flight-Test-UAS-Sense-and-Avoid-Technology_85479.html#.Vv_f2_krLIU