Pablo Royo Chic

Service abstraction layer for UAV flexible application development

An Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) is an uninhabited airplane, piloted by embed- ded avionics and supervised by an operator on ground. Unmanned Aerial Systems were designed to operate in dangerous situations, like military missions. With the avionics tech- nological evolution, Unmanned Aerial Systems also become a valid option for commercial applications, specially for dull and tedious surveillance applications. Cost considerations will also deviate some mission done today with conventional aircrafts to Unmanned Aerial Systems. In order to build economically viable UAS solutions, the same platform should be able to implement a variety of missions with little reconfiguration time and overhead. This paper describes a software abstraction layer for a Unmanned Aerial System distributed architecture. The proposed abstraction layer allows the easy and fast design of missions and solves in a cost-effective way the reusability of the system. The distributed architecture of the Unmanned Aerial System is service oriented. Func- tional units are implemented as independent services that interact each other using commu- nication primitives in a network centric approach. The paper presents a set of predefined services useful for reconfigurable civil missions and the directives for their communication.

Fligth dispatching for unmanned aerial vehicles

Flight dispatching is the set of tasks related to flight preparation, such as load and balance, meteorology study and briefing, operational flight planning, contingency analysis and planning, etc. The flight dispatcher must be in close contact with the pilot in command in order to verify that the airplane is airworthy, furnishing all kinds of information needed to properly operate the system. The advent of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) operating on civil missions will require developing new dispatching processes that take into account the main role of these vehicles: the mission. Traditional aviation focuses on point to point transportation of passengers and/or cargo. However, UAVs usually focus on surveillance applications that require large sets of sensors and complementary avionics to properly develop their assigned task. This paper presents the design of a new dispatching methodology focused for UAV civil applications. The overall process is mission-centric, focusing on all the requirements needed to properly implement the assigned tasks, but also integrating the traditional dispatching requirements of manned aircraft. The proposed dispatching process is built upon a specific UAV mission architecture, the Unmanned Service Architecture (USAL). Based on this architecture a methodology is introduced to characterize the mission objectives, the UAV airframe and its various characteristics, the software services required for managing the flight and the mission, the sensor and computational payload, etc. All these elements are combined together in an iterative dispatching flow. The result of the process is the actual UAV configuration in terms of fuel, electrical system, payload configuration, flight plan, etc; but also detailed flight plan, alternative routes and landing sites, detailed USAL service architecture and even contingency planning.

Requirements, issues, and challenges for sense and avoid in Unmanned Aircraft Systems

The sense and avoid capability is one of the greatest challenges that has to be addressed to safely integrate unmanned aircraft systems into civil and nonsegregated airspace. This paper gives a review of existing regulations, recommended practices, and standards in sense and avoid for unmanned aircraft systems. Gaps and issues are identified, as are the different factors that are likely to affect actual sense and avoid requirements. It is found that the operational environment (flight altitude, meteorological conditions, and class of airspace) plays an important role when determining the type of flying hazards that the unmanned aircraft system might encounter. In addition, the automation level and the data-link architecture of the unmanned aircraft system are key factors that will definitely determine the sense and avoid system requirements. Tactical unmanned aircraft, performing similar missions to general aviation, are found to be the most challenging systems from an sense and avoid point of view, and further research and development efforts are still needed before their seamless integration into nonsegregated airspace.