download pdf version

Introduction As technology advances, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) become capable of more complex missions, including intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, strike, suppression of enemy air defense, electronic attack, communications, aerial delivery, and resupply missions. The Challenge Soon these UAVs will shift from being flown singly—one operator/ per vehicle—to being operated through automated tasking, significantly increasing the number of UAVs sharing critical airspace. The challenge is to safely manage airspace crowded with UAVs. Furthermore, the portions of the airspace with the highest traffic densities are typically the ones most critical to mission success. Sophisticated tools are needed to automate the management of airspace safety while allowing an increasing number of UAVs flying an increasing number of mission profiles. The Solution Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories’ (LM ATL) Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Airspace Management System (UAMS) demonstrated the ability to automatically deconflict groups of UAVs with limited sensor, communications, and processing capabilities. UAMS—a battalion level system— provides airspace management to multiple UAVs in the battlespace. UAMS monitors networked UAVs, detects potential collisions, and deconflicts their flight paths. It also uses on-board sensors to “see-and-avoid” obstacles and other aircraft. UAMS provides three capabilities: deconfliction of UAVs flying autonomously, deconfliction of UAVs with aircraft not managed by UAMS moving through the airspace, and obstacle clearance. In each case UAMS detects the potential collision and replans the paths of UAVs under its control. UAMS separates the deconfliction problem into three parts: situational awareness, conflict detection, and deconfliction. UAMS distributes the airspace management task between a server on the ground and software agents in the UAVs, dynamically shifting responsibility for these activities depending on terrain and communications reliability. While UAMS is able to perform all of these activities on a centralized server, it can also distribute data to the UAVs for pairwise deconfliction or it can use a hybrid approach with some activities centralized on the server and some distributed to the UAVs. UAMS is able to dynamically shift between strategies on the fly based on the current situation and user-defined policies, which are based on terrain, communications load, and other factors. The Future The UAMS system was developed under a program completed for the U.S. Army Aviation Applied Technology Directorate. Technologies developed in this program have broad applications in airspace management and collision avoidance.