Unmanned aircraft research in support of NextGen trajectory based operations

The two predominately challenging issues facing the development of standards for unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) integration into the national air space (NAS) are collision avoidance and UAS command and control link integrity. This paper discusses an approach for addressing the collision avoidance issues affecting UAS and shows how advances in this area can contribute to the advancement of the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen). The approach focuses on the formation of a robust surveillance picture that maximizes the utilization of new NextGen technologies to identify and track UAS flight profile conformance and to provide that fused UAS track to all the various systems and organizations/agencies that require/desire it including FAA ATC facilities. Additionally, this will provide the UAS operator actual tracks of all other aircraft (cooperative and non-cooperative) similar to traffic information service - broadcast (TIS-B) service within the same geographic area. This paper presents the results of a surveillance analysis based on sensors of opportunity in the NAS, and sensors anticipated to be available onboard the UAS. Given the available surveillance picture and expected traffic patterns, we show how the proposed application contributes to the safety assessment for a proposed concept of operations. Through more thorough applications of the proposed approach we hope to accelerate safe integration of UAS into the US airspace and support the development and deployment of trajectory based operations in the NAS.