NASA is moving quickly to develop a system to enable safe and efficient operation of civil unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) at low altitudes outside controlled airspace, under pressure from—and taking advantage of—entrepreneurs eager to develop commercial applications.
Flight experiments with commercial partners will begin this year under the UAS Traffic Management (UTM) project. Over a series of four increasingly capable software builds, NASA plans to enable safe low-altitude operations by unmanned and manned aircraft within five years, laying the foundation for what is expected to be a dramatic increase in the use of airspace now outside air traffic control.
Since unveiling its UTM concept early last year to an enthusiastic reception from a community frustrated by long delays in the development of regulations enabling commercial UAS use in U.S. airspace, NASA has aggressively pursued partnerships with industry and the FAA to develop the system. “We have more than 100 interested parties, and have formed a joint NASA-FAA research transition team,” says UTM principal investigator Parimal Kopardekar.
Partners range from consumer drone manufacturers DJI and 3DRobotics, through commercial UAS flight control system supplier Airware, to companies such as Drone Deploy, PixiePath and SkyWard, which already are developing cloud-based services enabling operators to manage fleets of unmanned aircraft flying in uncontrolled low-altitude airspace. Their uses range from crop monitoring to package delivery.
Kopardekar says testing is planned for the spring and summer at multiple sites. The first build, UTM1, will be focused on airspace design and trajectory management. Using a web interface, airspace managers will be able to geo-fence UAS operations, set up altitude “rules of the road” for procedural separation, schedule vehicle trajectories and decide whether to open or close airspace. Users will be able to create trajectories and check them against airspace constraints, wind and weather forecasts, an obstacle database and the plans of other operators. Later builds are planned to make the system more capable, dynamic and automated to handle higher traffic densities and manage increasingly complex contingencies.
Although the U.S. lags countries such as Australia, Canada, France and the U.K. in approving commercial UAS operations, industry sees the NASA program as a chance to jump ahead. “UTM is unique and visionary,” says Jesse Kallman, head of business development and regulatory affairs at Airware, which in December attracted strategic investment from General Electric’s GE Ventures arm. The company supplies autopilots for UAS used in commercial operations in France and elsewhere, and plans to bring its experience, and customers, into the UTM project through its cooperation with NASA.
“We understand what really provides safety for commercial small UAS operations and are bringing our feedback and experience from Europe back here,” Kallman says. “We provide a common interface, a way to operate vehicles safely and reliably. We can bring in multiple different types of aircraft from our customers, multi-rotor and fixed-wing, and it will be easier see how they respond—how long it takes them to land after an input, how to space them out—when they have that commonality.”
NASA’s willingness to work in partnership is being welcomed by an emerging industry. “A consortium of private companies has been working with NASA for several months. It’s a good forum for industry participation and to work on standards for how to interoperate, all in the name of safety and predictability,” says Bryan Field-Elliot, “serial entrepreneur” and founder of PixiePath, which is developing a cloud platform enabling operators to control fleets of UAS. “NASA is doing a good job.
“Our principal objective is to create a simple tool for software developers to build drone applications; allow users to simulate the operation of hundreds or thousands of drones, or just two or three; and enable them to connect their UAVs to the cloud and control them in real time,” he says. PixiePath plans to develop adapter “apps” for all major UAS types, beginning with DJI and 3DR, to connect them to the cloud for real-time data streaming and fleet management. “We will have a handful of early users by late January and select a few high-value users for a beta test in February,” says Field-Elliot.
Also developing a software platform to provide UAS operations management as a service, SkyWard has partnered with NASA to incorporate UTM research into its Urban Skyways Project, which is planned to involve demonstrations this year of commercial small UAS networks in Las Vegas, Vancouver, London, and Portland, Oregon, for package delivery, emergency response and infrastructure inspection missions. SkyWard is working with DJI and 3DR as well as specialists in cloud control, aerial surveys, image processing and industrial inspections.
A version of this article appears in the January 15-February 1, 2015 issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology.