USMC looks to manage UAV airspace

With American airspace increasingly crowded, federal planners are currently hard at work developing a modern aircraft control system capable of handling the housands of planes, helicopters, and — increasingly — UAVs. Such is a difficult task, and we wish them well, but the military cannot afford to wait. This is why the Marine Corps this week expressed serious interest in a miniature radar-based collision avoidance sensor suite (RCASS) for UAVs operating autonomously in civil airspace and announced that it would begin receiving formal solicitations on 20 February. The Office of Naval Research “is interested in any intelligent autonomous systems that would be able to perform the sense and avoid function while adhering to the size, weight and power constraints of small UAVs. The Navy will only fund proposals that are innovative and involve technical risk,” the Corps explained.

Some technical requirements: the system must be capable of being carried by a platform in the class of the Advanced Ceramics Silver Fox, meaning that the target weight is approximetly 2.42 pounds with a volume of less than 12.2 cubic inches in a nominal small UAV payload bay. It should be “effective against all air traffic, with or without transponder-based collision avoidance systems, and must provide an energy density per unit solid angle supporting detection at ranges compatible with collision avoidance.” Other requirements include the ability to sense 3D trajectories of neighboring air traffic while also maintaining its own internal map of the air space; the ability to operate on a stand-alone basis, rather than as a component of an integrated air traffic management system; and compatibility with a wide-ranging suite of UAV sensors and avionic equipment.

-read more in Peter La Franchi’s FlightGlobal report