Claudia Bacco looks at the pioneering drone tech being developed by Vigilant Aerospace Systems for both military and civilian use
As the flight of autonomous commercial aircraft becomes more mainstream it must co-exist safely with general aviation in the national airspace. This applies not only to civil aviation, with all branches of the US military having embraced autonomous vehicles and aircraft.
Oklahoma-based Vigilant Aerospace Systems’ FlightHorizon PILOT onboard detect-and-avoid system for drones is designed to read sensor data, detect nearby aircraft and provide collision avoidance commands to remote pilots or to the onboard autopilot.
The company is involved in a number of major initiatives to test the true effectiveness of flight operations at large-scale, working with several key defence, research and commercial organisations. This is an opportunity to observe the absolute limits and capabilities of autonomous flight in real-world conditions and for some of the most demanding missions.
Working with the FAA
One such initiative saw the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) award a contract titled ‘Enabling Unmanned Aircraft Systems Beyond-Visual Line-of-Sight Flight Operations with FlightHorizon Detect-And-Avoid’ to Vigilant Aerospace. The project involved flight testing with multiple radar systems as inputs to the company’s detect-and-avoid and airspace management system, FlightHorizon, at the Alaska UAS Test Site operated by the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Vigilant Aerospace was the first private company tapped by the FAA
to perform this kind of research in the US.
Although the Alaska Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration (ACUASI) sits within the Geophysical Institute, ACUASI leads all uncrewed aircraft programmes across the entire university. Aviation is crucial to the region and ACUASI is considered one of the top drone research programmes in the US. It led the flight testing with Vigilant for this FAA-sponsored project.
Nick Adkins, director of operations at ACUASI, explained the role it played in the FAA trial: “We’re working on detect-and-avoid technology to find out when a sensor says something is in the airspace, where it actually is – kind of the truth in the data. We have a flying radar and we have three different ground radars, and all of that information is being compiled for the FAA. We’re trying to set up a test for what could be detect-and-avoid technology to allow a drone into the airspace safely.”
During testing, the UAS was flown for miles along the Trans-Alaska Pipeline with FlightHorizon PILOT onboard with a radar, transponder and multiple ground radars. The UAS was operated by the ACUASI team as crewed aircraft flew passes over the pipeline to provide data to the FlightHorizon system. The FlightHorizon software displayed the air traffic, produced safety alerts and logged the aircraft tracks for later analysis and submission to the FAA. “The testing here is how we bring uncrewed aerial vehicles [UAVs] into integration with classical airspace, in a safe and controlled airspace,” explained Levi Purdy, engineering technician for ACUASI.
The WindMap Project
The NASA University Leadership Initiative (ULI) WindMap Project addresses the emerging need to provide real-time weather forecasting to improve the safety of low-altitude
aircraft operations. This is accomplished through the integration of real-time observations from autonomous systems, such as drones and urban air taxis, with numerical weather prediction models and flight management and safety systems. Autonomous aircraft can also fly into dangerous weather conditions to collect data, unlike traditional aviation, which is also more expensive.
This NASA-sponsored project was managed by Oklahoma State University with Vigilant Aerospace as the airspace management partner. The goal was to demonstrate the value of using small UAS to collect atmospheric data at scales that exceed the resolution of today’s best weather prediction models.
The company’s involvement was to integrate TITAN storm track prediction data into the FlightHorizon system. Developed by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), TITAN provides highly detailed, long-range storm track predictions using real-time radar and satellite data. The combination of FlightHorizon and TITAN provides pilots with predictions of storm tracks up to two hours ahead, providing much better hazard predictions than are currently available.
The company also supports a related OSU and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) project to collect wind and weather data at high altitude using small drones, to better model and predict severe weather.
The goal of the project is to station autonomous drones at remote locations to automatically collect data hourly, with integration to a detect-and-avoid system for flight safety. The company is scheduled to support this project through 2027.
Long-endurance drones
The US Air Force and other branches of the military are deploying thousands of new autonomous vehicles and aircraft, pushing detect-and-avoid (DAA) solutions to the limit. However, just like everyone else, they do not have direct access to the National Airspace System (NAS) and must obtain a Certificate of Waiver or Authorization (COA) from the FAA to fly precoordinated routes across the country between US Department of Defense special-use airspaces.
Vigilant Aerospace Systems is working with the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) to develop a DAA system for the USAF’s new long-endurance drone. The AFRL is the primary scientific research and development centre for the Department of the Air Force.
The project aims to integrate the FlightHorizon dual-use, military and civilian detect-and-avoid product onto an existing long-endurance UAS platform, to improve flight safety and
leverage new lower size, weight and power (SWaP) sensors.
The system provides avoidance commands that are compliant with the ACAS X standards from the FAA and delivers air traffic alerts and situational awareness to remote pilots. It’s an extendable, scalable solution that fills an important technology gap for UAS.
Importantly, the product had to be platform agnostic so it could be installed on a wide variety of both military and civilian aircraft and utilise a range of sensors. It also had to be compliant with the RTCA DO-365C and DO-366 technical standards. The system is expected to be able to correlate tracks from multiple sensors in a compact unit that integrates with multiple autopilots and ground control stations.
Testing of the product included use with multiple radars operating simultaneously, allowing it to obtain a wide field of regard. It used radar frequency channelisation to prevent cross-interference. Furthermore, it had to integrate to multiple ground control stations (GCS) and deploy to multiple low space, weight and power (low-SWaP) computers to ensure it could be installed on both large and small UAS. Crucially, the project was required to operate in either a pilot-in-the-loop or a pilot-on-the-loop model.
Kraettli L Epperson, CEO and co-founder of Vigilant Aerospace Systems, said: “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.”
These projects, Epperson stressed, are just a few examples of the types of testing and research efforts that are currently underway and provide important foundations for the wider acceptance of uncrewed aircraft into national airspace.
