Australian researchers are preparing to demonstrate by year-end an automated separation management system (ASMS) they hope will allow manned and unmanned aircraft to share large and complex regions of airspace.
Reece Clothier of the Australian Research Centre for Aerospace Automation (ARCAA) says ASMS flight-testing at Kingaroy in Queensland so far indicated that "the system is capable of handling far more complicated scenarios than we initially expected".
By the end of the year he hopes to demonstrate separation between 50 aircraft - real and simulated - all operating within a radius of 10nm (18.5km).
The Smart Skies project - involving Boeing Research and Technology and ARCAA, which is a joint venture between the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and the Queensland University of Technology - had originally hoped to handle 30 aircraft.
The partners are developing three key enabling technologies: ASMS, a static sense-and-act (SSA) system for manned and unmanned aircraft capable of collision avoidance of dynamic and static obstacles; and a mobile aircraft tracking system using a cost-effective radar and dependent surveillance systems.
SSA flight tests have focused on avoidance of static obstacles such as trees, buildings and powerlines, with the primary test platform being ARCAA's unmanned helicopter. The SSA system uses an integrated laser scanner and stereo-camera system to build situational awareness of its environment. Path planning and graph-search algorithms then determine an optimal collision-free path.
The SSA system is also being tested for collision avoidance of other aircraft, with the ARCAA Shadow and Flamingo fixed-wing unmanned systems as test platforms. The passive system uses an on-board camera and novel image processing algorithm to implement appropriate separation manoeuvres.
By the end of last year the partners had collected enough data to characterise sensor-hardware performance and provide researchers with real-life sensor data for a broad range of scenarios. Subsequent algorithm refinement and automated closed-loop trials, in which the SSA systems had to detect and avoid obstacles and other aircraft without human input, are being followed by integration of sense-and-act capability into the global ASMS.
The three-year A$10 million ($8.75 million) project is due to be completed in March 2011 but the partners are already discussing a possible Smart Skies Two, with a formal announcement expected by the middle of this year, says Clothier.
Source: Flight International
