Enhancing Safety of UAVs in National Airspace

Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAV), also known as Unmanned Air Systems (UAS), are gaining more attention in recent years. Some potential commercial applications may include cargo transfer between major cities, package and food delivery to individual households, etc. However, it is well-known that UAVs are much less reliable and have far more accidents than manned aircraft. This is probably one of the most important reasons that FAA is hesitant to open up the national airspace (NAS) and imposes tight restrictions to UAVs. In this paper, we present some recent research results done by our team to deal with major contingencies such as lost communications and engines failures. In particular, contingency planning software prototypes have been developed that can deal with those aforementioned major contingencies. Architectures of contingency planning software and some exemplar application scenarios will be discussed throughout the paper.