A unified approach to separation assurance and Collision Avoidance for UAS operations and traffic management

A unified approach to cooperative and noncooperative Separation Assurance and Collision Avoidance (SA&CA) is presented addressing the technical and regulatory challenges of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) integration into all classes of airspace. Additionally, the emerging UAS Traffic Management (UTM) system requirements are captured and addressed in this novel unified framework. Uncertainties in navigation and tracking error measurements associated to each manned/unmanned platform (as seen by all other conflicting platforms) are combined statistically to generate avoidance volumes in the airspace. The unified approach to SA&CA provides the required tools to generate uncertainty volumes at discrete time intervals as a function of traffic relative dynamics and thus supports the generation of dynamic geo-fences and multiplatform UTM system implementation. Case studies are presented for evaluating the feasibility of the approach in an urban environment. In this approach, real-time and off-line determination of the UAS safe-to-fly envelope is performed based on the installed avionics sensors and on the own/intruder platform dynamics. Additionally, the required sensors are identified for the UAS to safely fly a certain predefined envelope supporting the development of the SA&CA system certification case and thus providing a pathway to certification.