Inside Unmanned Systems provides actionable business intelligence to decision-makers and influencers operating within the global UAS community. Features include analysis of key technologies, policy/regulatory developments and new product design.
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8 unmanned systems inside Spring 2014 NINE TEAMS OF STUDENTS and private sector inventors will compete this fall to see who can build the best detect-and-avoid system for small unmanned aircraft. The Unmanned Aircraft Systems Airspace Operations Challenge, which offers a $500,000 prize, will be held Sept. 10-17 in Indiana. The event is one of NASA's Centennial Challenges, a program inspired by the Wright Broth- ers that aims to engage the creativity of citizen inventors to solve important aerospace problems. More than 20 Cen- tennial Challenges have been held so far with teams taking home nearly $6 million in prize money. NASA supplies the prizes but there are no guaranteed winners—teams must fully complete the tasks to claim the money. The inven- tors keep their intellectual property but NASA has the option to negotiate access to the technology, as do other public and private organizations. For this challenge the teams will try to pilot an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) through multiple 30-minute missions, completing each course on time while detecting and avoiding other aircraft and dealing with problems like the loss of their communications link. Bonus points will be awarded if the aircraft can still operate after the GPS signal is inter- rupted or modified during the flight. In this first phase of the contest the other aircraft will be cooperative, and will let, their location be known by broadcasting Automatic Dependent Sur- veillance Broadcast (ADS-B) messages. The judges will award additional bonus points if the competing UAV can detect and record the location of "uncoopera- tive" aircraft operating without an ADS- B signal. In Phase 2 of the contest, which is expected to be worth $1 million to the winners, the teams' aircraft must be able to detect and avoid planes without ADS-B equipment. That portion of the contest is planned for the fall of 2015. Among those competing are Robota, a Dallas company that offers mapping UAVs and the Goose autopilot; and Craft and Theory, a North Dakota firm that provides turnkey UAVs. Another firm, CIP Drones of Seattle, will enter a fix-wing system. There are six academic teams: two from Embry-Riddle, one each from the Daytona and Prescott campuses, squads from Oklahoma State and Ohio State Universities and the Georgia Insti- tute of Technology. The ASU Advanced Autonomous Airborne Collision Avoid- ance Research Team (A4CART) from Arizona State University will be com- peting with the Mugin, a fix-wing UAV with a 3-meter wingspan. The rules focus on safe aircraft opera- tions instead of vehicle performance in an attempt to provide a level playing field for all competitors, regardless of their aircraft. The competition will be held at the Ohio/Indiana UAS Center & Test Complex at the Camp Atterbury Range, near Edinburgh, Ind. NEWS BRIEFS Nine teams enter NASA's $500,000 sense-and-avoid Challenge UAS Center of Excellence solicitation to be released in May OFFICIALS WILL RELEASE A DRAFT solicitation for the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA's) new Center of Excellence for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) and field questions at a late-May meeting in Washington. The Center is being launched to support the FAA's mission to ensure safety during the integration of un- manned aircraft into the national airspace system. Members of the winning consortium will be required to perform research to help fill the gaps in the agency's integration road- map including, at a minimum, work involving air traffic control interop- erability, airport ground operations, command and control, detect and avoid, human factors, system per- formance, privacy practices for UAS operations, system engineering and The new Center of Excellence will do research to support the Federal Aviation Administration as it works to integrate unmanned aircraft into the national airspace. Continued on p. 10