Demonstration flights of a sense and avoid system for unmanned air vehicles are to take place in August using an Aerostar aircraft and a Beechcraft King Air.
Check out flights will be carried out in July for the tests that will take place at White Sands Missile Range. The Beech King Air acts as the intruder and the Aerostar is fitted with three digital video camera sensors that have a +/-95 degree view. With a starting separation of 32.3km (17.5nm), the King Air will be at 9,000ft (2,740m) and the Aerostar at 9,500ft. Tests will involve both head-on and crossing collision scenarios. For the avoidance manoeuvre the Aerostar will go into a bank for a 60 degree heading change.
"We think it is the first demonstration of sense and avoid," said Defense Research Associate's Andrew White, speaking at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International North America 2008 symposium in San Diego, California on 11 June.
His company has worked on sense and avoid technologies with the US Air Force Research Laboratory for seven years. White declined to discuss development costs.
Ideally for aircraft detection a 110 degree field of view is required, however custom optics would be needed and their cost led to a decision to use a limited 95 degree field of view, says White.
The sensor system's challenges are rain, although to date light rain has not been a problem, and software false alarms, which can be caused by ground clutter, small cloud wisps and pixel misidentification. A detection algorithm was written to ignore pixels that do not move.
Source: Flight International
