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ENGINEERING. PRACTICE. POLICY. 53 unmanned systems inside January/February 2016 Photos courtesy of New Mexico State University UAS f lights with the least amount of expense and disruption. Wanted: Real World Data The complexities involved are enormous and ASSURE is reaching out to industry to ensure their results incorporate operators' real-world experience. "I can imagine 1,000 different ways that some- one could fly but there are some ways that people are actually operating and we want to get that in- formation," said Henry Cathey, a NMSU profes- sor and one of the lead researchers on the project. They are interested in getting flight data and use cases that flesh out the ways people are using unmanned aircraft to accomplish tasks, Cathey said. They would like information on any type of application including activities such as search and rescue, pipeline monitoring, photography, infrastructure inspection, agricultural remote sensing, wildlife assessment, ice spotting and livestock management—plus any other appli- cations operators would like them to consider. Anyone can submit cases or flight data includ- ing international firms. "We would like input from as many places as possible," Cathey said. The data would be pro- tected, he said. "We will ensure that the flight data will only be used for research and it will not be disseminated to other organizations." Orga- nizations who want to participate but are con- cerned about propriety information can consider submitting representative cases, he said. Sense and Avoid Solutions ASSURE will use the flight information to cre- ate representative use cases—examples based on compellations of similar applications. Power line inspection, for instance, might be grouped with pipeline inspection as they both involve long, linear flights along known, largely unpop- ulated stretches. In this first phase the teams will focus on applications over non-populated areas, away from airports and at altitudes largely below 500 feet—though they will include use cases that range up to 1,000 feet in altitude. Information from the representative cases will be used to build an operational framework that will be the basis for equipment testing, Cathey said. At the end of this we should know what a really good system should be able to do." –Kyle Snyder, lead researcher for surveillance criticality study, North Carolina State University " The Federal Aviation Administration has launched a study to determine what will be needed to safely allow small, unmanned aircraft to f y beyond the visual line-of-sight of their operators under limited circumstances. New Mexico State University, one of the co-leads on the research, is gathering f ight use cases and real- world f ight data to support testing of the necessary detect and avoid technologies. Pictured clockwise from upper left: A building is ref ected in a DSP payload, the Vortex 700 UAS takes f ight, the Orbiter unmanned aircraft is readied for launch.