Last October Vigilant Aerospace kicked off a groundbreaking project for the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) to develop a detect-and-avoid (DAA) system for the Air Force’s new long-endurance drone. The company has continued to reach important milestones on the path to bringing FlightHorizon PILOT, our dual-use (i.e. for both civilian and military users) onboard detect-and-avoid product, to the military.
This project is being completed under an SBIR Phase II contract, which is a program designed to fill important capability gaps quickly and to utilize technologies that have a high-impact, near-term implementation path for the military as well as having a potential civilian market.
This project represents a major investment by the US Air Force in the future of UAS (uncrewed aircraft system) operations and airspace safety and recognition of the major role autonomous systems will play in the future of both defense and civilian aviation.
The Mission
According to the public project profile, the objective is to “integrate a mature detect and avoid capability on an existing long-endurance, Group V UAS platform for increased aircraft and pilot-in-the-loop operational awareness that leverages new and evolving C-SWaP sensors and sensor fusion software.”
The project solicitation lists goals including demonstrating the utility of the system to several Air Force missions at different stages of conceptual maturity, supporting future missions and a strong recognition that autonomous flight is here to stay.
“Because the FlightHorizon system was designed by NASA for its aircraft tracking and UAS safety needs and has now been adapted to the commercial market by Vigilant Aerospace, this AFRL opportunity allows us to leverage our existing products and experience, and our major investment in multi-sensor integration and algorithms, to readily fulfill the AFRL project goals and rapidly bring new capabilities to the US Air Force,” said Kraettli L. Epperson, CEO of Vigilant Aerospace.
To accomplish this goal, Vigilant is utilizing its FlightHorizon PILOT product, which is an onboard detect-and-avoid system for drones that is designed to consume sensor data, detect nearby aircraft and provide collision avoidance commands to remote pilots or to the onboard autopilot.
The system provides commands that are compliant with the ACAS X collision avoidance standards from the FAA and can also provide air traffic alerts and situational awareness to remote pilots. It’s an extensible, scalable solution which fills an important gap for a viable, onboard, feature-complete, automatic DAA system.
Concept behind the FlightHorizon PILOT system, which is based on two licensed NASA patents.
Importantly, the product is platform agnostic so it can be installed on a wide variety of both military and civilian aircraft and can utilize a wide variety of radars and other sensors. It is also designed to be compliant with the RTCA DO-365C and DO-366 technical standards, to allow for use on any large UAS in the US.
The ability to correlate tracks from multiple sensors in a smart, compact unit that integrates with multiple autopilots and ground control stations provides the military with flexibility and modularity in the deployment of the system on a variety of potential UAS platforms.
Progress to Date
- The FlightHorizon PILOT system has been effectively tested with multiple radars operating simultaneously, allowing it to obtain a wide field of regard for air traffic detection that helps the product to meet industry technical standards for both onboard detect-and-avoid and to support distributed sensor nodes when used on the ground.
- Radar frequency channelization has been utilized and tested to demonstrate that multiple radars can be used without interference with each other.
- The system has been integrated to multiple ground control stations (GCS), including the popular Ardupilot open-source software and other widely used government and civilian GCS systems.
- Vigilant has deployed the software to multiple low space, weight and power (low-SWaP) computers for onboard use, including multiple single-board computers, in an effort to ensure it can be installed on a wide variety of both military and civilian aircraft. This may include both larger military and AAM aircraft and smaller UAS, where space and power are at a premium.
- The system is under development to be operated in either a “pilot-in-the-loop” model, where avoidance commands are sent to a remote pilot to be followed, or in a “pilot-on-the-loop” model, where a remote pilot receives alerts about avoidance maneuvers that will be taken automatically by the system and can intervene if needed.
The Military Need for Onboard Detect-and-Avoid
Detect-and-avoid is a critical area of innovation as the Air Force and other branches of the military begin deploying thousands of new autonomous vehicles and aircraft. Simultaneously, the need for onboard DAA for commercial UAS and AAM aircraft continues to grow as the industry scales up.
According to the US Department of Defense, the US military currently operates more than 11,000 UAS in support of both training events and overseas missions. These aircraft range in size from the small RQ-11B Raven to the large RQ/MQ-4 Global Hawk/Triton, which weighs more than 32,000 pounds.
In addition, US military UAS currently do not have direct access to the National Airspace System (NAS). For flights in civilian airspace, the Department of Defense must obtain a Certificate of Waiver or Authorization (COA) from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to allow UAS to fly pre-coordinated routes across the country between Department of Defense special use airspaces.
Adoption of detect-and-avoid systems like FlightHorizon PILOT for military aircraft can improve collision avoidance, increase autonomy, provide better situational awareness and improve integration to civilian air traffic control, which can allow for faster and easier authorizations and safer transits. In addition, better integration of both large military and civilian UAS into the national airspace can also improve US competitiveness as other nations continue to develop large military and civilian drone and AAM platforms.
“This is an important project in terms of fully integrating FlightHorizon into a wider range of aircraft, which is critical to industry adoption and deployment of this technology in the future. It’s also been a highly successful collaboration, with support from the Small Business Administration (SBA), the Air Force and the Air Force Research Lab,” explained Epperson.
Looking Beyond the SBIR Phase II Project – The Implications of this Project
In addition to serving immediate military needs, development and testing of the FlightHorizon PILOT product can bring much needed capability to the civilian Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) market, which is also growing quickly and requires onboard collision avoidance and DAA as much as military aircraft do.
Regarding civilian AAM, according to the latest forecast from Aviation Week, there are expected to be 2,000 commercial electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing (eVTOL) vehicles in operation by 2030 and steep growth to 33,000 aircraft in operation by 2050 with Archer Aviation alone gearing up to produce 650 aircraft per year at its new California manufacturing facility. Massive technological innovation and rollout of safety systems will be required to support these growth rates and the dramatic changes to the aviation industry landscape.
This project is expected to help fill an important safety gap across multiple user types:
“This project gives Vigilant the insight and expertise necessary to integrate our dual-use product into multiple aircraft systems and ground control stations, improving the availability of this critical safety system not only to multiple users across the military, but also helps to prepare us to meet the anticipated demand from the civilian Advanced Air Mobility industry for this technology,” said Epperson.
