NASA X: Unmanned Aircraft Systems-Transforming the Horizon

Anyone with an interest in learning how the 20,000 drones (UAS) expected by
2020 will be integrated into the National Airspace System will find the
information in this Emmy Award winning NASA video informative. The various
NASA departments and people charged with the four main aspects of the task of
safely integrating pilotless vehicle operations into the mix of airline, GA and
military operations over the US are introduced.

Sense and Avoid: NASA Langley and Ames Research Centers

Command and Control: NASA Glenn Center

Human Systems Integration: NASA Ames and Glenn Centers

Integrated Test and Evaluation: NASA Armstrong and Ames Centers

You will meet:

Edger Waggoner, Director of Integrated Systems Research Program

Davis Hackenberg, Debuty Project Manager of Intergration

Jim Griner, Human Systems Engineer, Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.

Sam Kim, Integrated Test and Evaluation, NASA Armstrong Research Center

Jay Shively, Integrated Test and Evaluation, NASA Ames

Confessor Santiago, Seperation Assurance, NASA Ames

It would appear that "sense-and-avoid" or "seperation assurace" will be
effected through the use of high-precision RADAR and TCAS. (More at the end of
this message.)

So click the link below and enjoy the video.


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December 11, 2014
NASA X: Unmanned Aircraft Systems-Transforming the Horizon

› View Now: http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/master_uas_nasa_hq_cc.mp4

Jennifer_Pulley– host
Dr. Edgar Waggoner - NASA HQ
Davis Hackenberg -NASA HQ
Laurie Grindle - NASA Armstrong
Debra Randall - NASA Armstrong
Sam Kim - NASA Armstrong
Confesor Santiago - NASA Ames
Jay Shively - NASA Ames
Jim Griner - NASA Glenn

Pulley: Throughout history, fear of change and the unknown has often caused
heightened anxiety to countless millions of us in the general public. But if we
look closely at history, this fear is often not borne out of outcomes. In fact,
the past is littered with stories of change that were feared in the early
stages eventually becoming accepted as a necessity, a comfort, or an option. A
perfect example of this came early in the 19th century, when electricity would
become an essential tool for modern life. The masses were used to lighting
candles and having open flames to illuminate the night with little regard for
the danger of fire. But for many, the idea of an entire home being electrified
created a new fear of electrocution. In one famous case, it is said that even
though President Benjamin Harrison had electricity installed in the White
House, he and his wife would not touch the light switches for fear of
electrocution, often resulting in them going to sleep with the lights on.
Clearly in the case of electricity, public opinion has changed dramatically, as
is true of so many other cases of societal change. Even though initial fear
followed by acceptance is a known phenomenon, these same old feelings are still
very powerful today, especially with our modern world changing so quickly. One
societal change that is occurring today that seems to be following the same
path are the feelings surrounding the rise and use of unmanned aircraft
systems, or UASs. For many, their only experience with these vehicles comes
from media reports about them being used by the military for intelligence
gathering and defense. Those images, coupled with privacy and safety concerns,
is causing some to fear using them back here at home. Many on the front lines
of the UAS revolution see tremendous advantages by using these devices in civil
applications such as farming, package delivery, wildfire detection, border
security, and numerous other uses. Only time, lawmakers, and public opinion
will answer the broader societal questions, but one thing is for sure; the
technical challenges surrounding these vehicles need to be answered now. Once
these vehicles begin to fly regularly here in the U.S., they clearly must be
able to work within our current commercial airspace in a safe and integrated
way. To make this happen, the government is turning to the world's leading
aeronautical organization, NASA, to help develop the framework and lay the
groundwork for integration into our airspace. Coming up on this episode of
"NASA X," we will follow members of NASA's Aeronautics Research Mission
Directorate's UAS Integration into the NAS project team as they tackle the
major hurdles of integrating these types of vehicles into our daily lives.
We'll see how researchers are solving technical challenges as well as concerns
around human factors in an effort to one day allow these vehicles to safely
integrate into our society.
[dramatic rock music]

Pulley: Every day, millions of people board planes here in the U.S. For most of
us who travel by air, we don't think much about all the systems in place to
make our flights as seamless and easy as most are. We travel from destination
to destination with little thought of all the people, equipment, and
regulations put in place to make our National Airspace System the safest in the
world. Airports, air traffic controllers, towers, communication systems,
maintenance crews, and thousands of other moving pieces along with regulations
are all key elements that allow for relatively smooth and safe operations for
the nearly 50,000 flights that take off and land in the U.S. every day. Our
National Airspace System, or NAS, is incredibly robust and, in fact, works so
well because everyone who works within the system understands their role and
the procedures that have to be laid out. But when you have a system that works
so well and is so vitally important, the idea of making fundamental system-wide
change can be daunting. And one of the biggest changes that will be confronting
the NAS shortly is the inclusion of unmanned aircraft systems, or UASs. The FAA
has strict rules outlining all aspects of piloted flight. But with no pilot
inside a craft, changes will need to be made to make sure these systems are as
safe and robust as possible.

Waggoner: Safety is always in the back of our mind and having these systems
that can be just as safe as a manned aircraft, which, we have the safest air
transportation system in the world, and so as the FAA takes these new
technologies, introduces those into unmanned aircraft, and introduces those
into the NAS, that safety will not be compromised. We are doing this and making
sure that then when the FAA assesses the technologies and assesses any airframe
and the avionics that they have or the sensors that they have on board, that
those are gonna meet the same sort of standards--maybe not the same exact
standards--the same sort of standards that they've established for manned
aircraft. So safety is always in the back of our mind, and it underpins every
decision we make and everything that we do.

Hackenberg: The task is definitely daunting. The--We focus particularly on
procedures and standards, so from the procedures side, the FAA has built a
very, very safe National Airspace System. Accidents essentially don't happen. A
lot of the rationale for that is procedural. Our air traffic controllers know
what they're doing. They know how to manage their airspace. And bringing UAS
into this system changes things. What we're trying to do is help inform
procedural developments so that the FAA can take our inputs and integrate them
into their new air traffic control system as they develop their next-gen
infrastructure.

Pulley: This is one of the reasons NASA has such a large role in the UAS
integration into the NAS. NASA has decades of understanding how to build a
system as complex as this into a functioning reality.

Grindle: The reason why NASA is involved is pretty much consistent with what
NASA does across the board. I mean, NASA is looking for investments in research
areas that will enhance the quality of life of your everyday person, and so
that applies in the area of aviation; that applies to things like looking at
how we can fly airplanes faster or use less fuel or do something positive for
the environment while still flying over that environment. So we've been doing
those kinds of things in aeronautics all along, and unmanned aircraft systems
is just another new technology that has the potential to enhance people's
quality of life.

Pulley: NASA planners laid out a game plan to tackle the major issues involved
in integrating UASs into the NAS. Their plan is to focus on four major
technical barriers to make this transition possible. These four include: Sense
and Avoid, Command and Control, Human Systems Integration, and Integrated Test
and Evaluation. The Sense and Avoid challenge is focused mainly on the
see-and-avoid problems UAVs have because there is no pilot in the cockpit.
Technology will need to be developed that will, in essence, replace the pilot's
eyes with incredibly accurate radar, helping UAV pilots on the ground avoid any
nearby aircraft. The Command and Control challenge will develop a new radio
system that will be integrated into the NAS, allowing for reliable and secure
communications. The Human Systems Integration challenge is essentially a human
factors challenge that will help configure uniform ground control systems and
displays to enable ground station pilots to work effectively. And the
Integrated Test and Evaluation challenge will provide a relevant environment,
which will allow researchers to integrate different components of the system
and test them in a virtual environment, then into real test flights. Each one
of these technical barriers have their own unique and challenging issues, but
due to the complexity associated with integrating each of these into one
system, NASA planners are working jointly on these issues to ensure proper
integration.

Randall: If you know a little bit about systems, you know you can't take
different elements of a system, and you can exercise them and test them, but if
you don't combine them into an integrated flow, you miss those little things,
and they don't really work well. So we don't want to just go out and have a lot
of silo subprojects. Those systems all interact and integrate within each
other.

Pulley: With this collaborative plan in place, NASA's four aeronautic centers
are working jointly to make this goal a reality.

Hackenberg: So the community working on unmanned aircraft systems is large. It
includes the Department of Defense. It includes Homeland Security. It includes
a significant number of people from the FAA and lots of people in the industry
working on standards. NASA has a relatively large hand in this also. We've got
four centers working on it. Our four technical challenges are spread across
those centers.

Pulley: Let's first look at the Command and Control challenge that is being led
here at NASA Glenn Research Center. Here is NASA's Jim Griner.

Griner: Before this project began, NASA surveyed the industry and other
government agencies in order to determine what areas needed to--technology
development for unmanned aircraft to be integrated. Two of those areas were
separation assurance--how to keep aircraft from--away from each other--and the
other area was communications--how to make sure we had a reliable, secure
communications link between the ground and the aircraft. So we worked with the
industry to develop the program that we're actually employing today--so what
technologies we need to develop and the performance requirements of those
technologies to make sure that those systems were robust and sound. So we have
been working alongside industry in performing testing to enable those standards
to be written for commercial entities to be able to certify equipment to put in
unmanned aircraft.
[engine whirring]
Unmanned aircraft are pretty much like standard aircraft that are flying today,
although they range from very small up to very large aircraft. But what we're
trying to do is take the pilot out of the cockpit and move that down to the
ground. So normally, there's wires and other cables connecting the pilot to the
aircraft. Now we're actually taking that cockpit, putting it on the ground, and
we're flying that with a wireless system. So it's really like a fly-by-wireless
type of system that we have flying the aircraft now. And so that communications
link, which is what I'm developing, has to be very reliable, I mean, just as
reliable as those wires that were connecting it on board the aircraft.

Pulley: Because the FAA has stringent rules in place about flying in the NAS,
the communications team at Glenn is using a surrogate aircraft to help with the
tests. Although this T-34 aircraft can be flown from the ground like an
unmanned aircraft, there is in fact a pilot sitting inside the cockpit to
monitor the flight during this initial testing phase.
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/aircraft/T-34C/index.html#.VOOPzfm_21k

Griner: In order to fly an unmanned aircraft in the National Airspace System,
you have to go through a long process to get a waiver to fly in that area, and
it's very restricted in usually sparsely populated areas and areas you may not
be flying an unmanned aircraft in the future in. So with us using manned
aircraft, we can fly anywhere in the National Airspace System where that
aircraft normally operates, and that allows us to test in a realistic
environment where we expect unmanned aircraft to actually be flying in the
future, rather than being restricted to portions of the desert or something,
where we may not see a lot of unmanned aircraft flying in the future. We'll be
integrating multiple technologies from the UAS project as a whole together and
flying those all as one mission, so there'll be a real pilot at the ground
control station developed for this project, as well as my radio link and then
algorithms on board the aircraft for the separation assurance portion of the
test. So all of that in concert lets us fly the aircraft, because the aircraft
will be in a surrogate type configuration, so the commands from the ground
control station will actually be maneuvering the aircraft. So in that, it's a
full end-to-end test in a realistic environment. The testing we're doing is
helping enable a whole new industry for unmanned aircraft, because without
this, civilian aircraft will not be able to fly in the National Airspace
System. NASA has all the correct facilities as well as the personnel involved
in order to be able to do this testing. There's been a long history with
aeronautical communications here at NASA Glenn that we've been working with the
FAA and industry on many occasions before, and other centers have also been
working closely with the FAA on their particular technologies related to UAS,
and those all will--came together within this focused project in order to bring
those technologies to fruition.

Pulley: If you look at unmanned aerial vehicles of today, one of the biggest
concerns comes from the fact that they cannot sense and avoid oncoming traffic
autonomously, which clearly represents a significant midair collision hazard to
other aircraft operating in the same airspace. Here at NASA Langley in Hampton,
Virginia, members of the UAS team are working diligently to make this concern a
thing of the past. One of the biggest challenges facing the integration of
unmanned vehicles in the NAS is separation assurance, or Sense and Avoid.
Understanding these variables and developing the automation to help pilots make
the proper decisions while navigating is challenging. Part of this challenge
comes in working through integration issues with air traffic control, pilots in
the air, and UAS pilots on the ground. With that in mind, the NASA Langley team
has put together sophisticated testing environments, which will allow pilots,
air traffic controllers, and researchers to work collaboratively in the
confines of the Air Traffic Operations Lab, or ATOL. This team is coming up
with procedures for pilots from unmanned stations to communicate and interact
in the most effective way with air traffic control and other piloted aircraft.
Although the ATOL is physically located at NASA Langley Research Center, a
component of this work is also being handled by a team at NASA Ames, located in
California's famed Silicon Valley. Here, the UAS team is working on both Sense
and Avoid and Human System Integration.

Shively: My area is Human Systems Integration, and so I work on the ground
control station, where the pilot or the operator sits to control the UAV, and
our work with integration in the NAS is really trying to understand what the
minimum displays are, what the information requirements are, for that operator
to safety operate in the National Airspace. And so we've been doing work with
the FAA, with RTCA Special Committee 228, to help develop the guidelines for
what the minimum information requirements are for UAV operators to fly in the
NAS. We're really primarily integrating technologies that exist today and
looking how they come together in an integrated system to be able to address
this need. For example, we're taking onboard radars integrated with other
surveillance systems to be able to ensure that the operators can perform
see-and-avoid functions that are currently done visually by manned aircraft.
And so it's primarily an integration of existing technologies and developing
the requirements and testing those requirements to ensure that the UAVs can
safely fly in the NAS.

Santiago: You start with what the UAS is. The UAS is a remotely piloted
vehicle. However, there's a lot of--there's a lot of safety built around the
fact that in manned aircraft, the pilot is looking out the glass, and that is
the last line of defense, hence, sense-and-avoid, self-separate. So what we're
trying to do is, we need to--we need to do research to integrate the fact that
there's a pilot on the ground performing that function, and how does that
integrate with separation assurance? That means, the air traffic controllers
that are separating manned aircraft safely as you transit through the airspace,
how does that play with the primary role of air traffic control? Does it
perturb their workload? How does it affect them in their day-to-day jobs as we
integrate more aircraft into the airspace? There's also implications of, what
does this--what are the effects on other aircraft that are flying? There's a
system equipped on every manned aircraft that's certified to fly over 10,000
feet. It's called TCAS, and this is a last line of defense to prevent
collisions. Well, the Sense and Avoid system has to interoperate with that
system. It has to play nicely. So specifically, my team is looking at the
barriers and the integration challenges of integrating UAVs that are trying to
propagate through the airspace system safely and how that affects other agents,
other users of the airspace, as well as the regulators--the air traffic
controllers that are providing the separation services.

Pulley: Just a few hours down the road from NASA Ames, the culmination of much
of this integration happens here at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center.
Since the earliest days of flight, this lakebed in the high desert has been
used to test virtually every type of aircraft imaginable.
[engines whirring]
This storied research center is where much of the flight testing for the UAS
integration into the NAS will take place. The final challenge is IT&E. Here is
NASA Armstrong's Sam Kim to explain.

Kim: IT&E stands for Integrated Test and Evaluation, and that subproject deals
with taking the research that a project is developing--all the software, the
algorithms, the procedures--and putting that into a relevant environment. That
relevant environment entails simulations that replicates the real world as
high-fidelity as possible, but then ultimately, we need to take that to a
flight test environment and--to be able to validate the results. As the word
"integrated," like, entails, right, in IT&E--the Integrated Test and
Evaluation--it is an integrated effort to take all the elements of the four
subprojects that are part of the UAS in the NAS project and try to get those
into an integrated environment. So, yes, we need to make sure that all the
systems can play together and, more importantly, that they really replicate the
real world as close as possible. So ultimately, like I said, it goes from the
simulations into flight test. So the research ground control station you see
behind me is one of the manifestations of that capability to integrate things.
It is a proof-of-concept ground control station that embodies all the--from the
human factors and some of the self-separation technologies that we're
developing, it's embodied in this proof-of-concept GCS. In this RGCS here, we
do bring in pilots, so we actually bring in our real UAS pilots. In fact, we've
not just used NASA research pilots, but we've also had to use the Air National
Guard pilots and been able to have a diverse, you know, evaluation of our
systems. So, yes, we're bringing the pilots here. They get immersed in the
simulation environment, and then we're able to collect meaningful data that
says that whether the systems we're designing are--present the right
information and whether they can assimilate that data quickly and be able to
react to the National Airspace flying.

Pulley: When the integration is complete, many of the so-called dull, dirty,
and dangerous missions will be turned over to these UAVs, paving the way for a
new, safer way to monitor important tasks. We are not there yet, but it's clear
that the UAS challenges that have been laid out are daunting. It is also clear
that the brilliant men and women of NASA are rising to the challenge as only
NASA can. Thanks to their pioneering work, we will soon have a new type of tool
available to humanity that will almost certainly prove to be invaluable by
making our world and skies safer and perhaps even better than we ever thought
they could be.

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See also:

NASA LANGLEY RESEARCH CENTER’S UNMANNED AERIAL SYSTEM SURROGATE RESEARCH
AIRCRAFT http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20110004205.pdf

NASA Armstrong Fact Sheet: Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration in the
National Airspace System February 28, 2014:
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/news/FactSheets/FS-075-DFRC.html#.VOOJd_m_21k

NASA's communications experts have begun flight testing a prototype radio as
part of the agency's contributions toward fully integrating civil and
commercial Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) into the National Airspace System
(NAS):
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/aeronautics/features/uas_prototype_radio.html#.VOOKwvm_21k

LVC-DE Simulation Aids UAS in the NAS Integration
September 6, 2013
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/Features/LVC-DE_Simulation.html#.VOOKx_m_21k

NASA, FAA, Industry Conduct Initial Sense-and-Avoid Test January 26, 2015
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/Features/acas_xu_paves_the_way.html#.VOOMYfm_21k

NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), General Atomics Aeronautical
Systems (GA-ASI) and Honeywell International Inc. have successfully
demonstrated a proof-of-concept sense-and-avoid (SAA) system, marking a major
milestone to inform the development of standards and regulations to safely
integrate Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) in the National Airspace System
(NAS). The results of this demonstration will aid in the development of the
FAA's Airborne Collision Avoidance System For Unmanned Aircraft (ACAS Xu) and
contribute to the broader UAS community.

According to UAS-NAS project manager Laurie Grindle, “Our team is working
toward solving our common goal of overcoming the challenges of integrating UAS
into the National Airspace System; a topic that has increasingly proved its
relevance as several industries across the country identify the need to fly
UAS. Completing these recent flight tests has brought us one more step toward
accomplishing that goal.”

GA-ASI worked with NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center to integrate the new
system aboard NASA's Ikhana research aircraft, a civilian version of the
company’s Predator B. The flight-test campaign in November and December 2014
evaluated the SAA system in a wide variety of collision-avoidance and
self-separation encounters between two remotely piloted aircraft and various
manned aircraft and included a sensor fusion algorithm being developed by
Honeywell.

“GA-ASI is proud to continue development of SAA technology with NASA, the FAA,
and our industry partners,” said Frank Pace, president, Aircraft Systems,
GA-ASI. “This public-private collaboration has achieved an important step for
the safe and efficient integration of UAS into civilian airspace by leveraging
NASA’s unique test capabilities and the FAA’s novel collision avoidance
technology.”

Initial SAA flight tests successfully demonstrated both the automatic collision
avoidance system as well as pilot-in-the-loop self-separation functionality for
UAS. Over the course of five weeks, nine flights were conducted. The team flew
170 encounters and collected over 50 hours of flight data with notable
accomplishments. These flight tests marked the first time that a UAS collision
avoidance system was tested without artificial horizontal and vertical offsets
applied to the algorithm as the air-to-air encounters were flown in actual
conflict conditions. These flights were also the first time that a coordinated
automatic response was employed by a UAS to resolve collision avoidance
conflicts. In addition, tests involving Armstrong’s Ikhana and a GA-owned
Predator B marked the first air-to-air collision avoidance encounters between
two UAS.

Objectives of this effort included evaluation of the performance of ACAS Xu
collision avoidance algorithms against air traffic using both legacy Traffic
Collision Avoidance System (TCAS II) messages and proof of concept Automatic
Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) messages. For these tests, air traffic
designated as a non-cooperative intruder was tracked using an air-to-air radar
system developed by GA-ASI. ACAS Xu is the first collision avoidance function
designed explicitly for UAS. It can be matched to aircraft performance and is
designed to be fully interoperable with future ACAS X variants as well as with
legacy systems such as the TCAS II currently used on most commercial transport
aircraft.

Researchers evaluated three self-separation displays and algorithms and their
ability to effectively inform the UAS pilot of nearby traffic and help resolve
conflicts in a timely manner. These flight tests also validated airborne radar
and ADS-B surveillance simulation models on sensor performance and
uncertainties to help determine the effects of these parameters and
environmental conditions on self-separation algorithm’s performance.
Flight-testing of collision-avoidance and self-separation technology
contributes to ongoing work to develop a technical standard for a
sense/detect-and-avoid system for UAS.

For more about NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong

Peter Merlin
NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center
(661) 276-2679