Method to Characterize Potential UAS Encounters Using Open Source Data
This work addresses safety concerns for UAS integration into airspace, but it is incremental as it builds on a previously demonstrated technique.
The paper tackles the problem of characterizing potential encounters between commercial and recreational unmanned aerial systems (UASs) in the US national airspace by developing a method to analytically calculate all potential relative geometries for inspection missions, resulting in trillions of calculations across sixteen locations.
As unmanned aerial systems (UASs) increasingly integrate into the US national airspace system, there is an increasing need to characterize how commercial and recreational UASs may encounter each other. To inform the development and evaluation of safety critical technologies, we demonstrate a methodology to analytically calculate all potential relative geometries between different UAS operations performing inspection missions. This method is based on a previously demonstrated technique that leverages open source geospatial information to generate representative unmanned aircraft trajectories. Using open source data and parallel processing techniques, we performed trillions of calculations to estimate the relative horizontal distance between geospatial points across sixteen locations.