Integration of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles into the common airspace

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are destined to replace manned aircraft in almost all dull, dirty and dangerous missions not only in the military domain but also in the civil sector. There are numerous applications including firefighting, agriculture, meteorology, airborne imaging, surveillance where they offer more flexible and cost effective operation compared to traditional human piloted operation. However UAVs cannot be used in urban populated areas without permission of the aviation authorities, which is a major obstacle against their widespread use. The main concern is the lack of a human eye onboard the unmanned aircraft.

The Systems and Control Laboratory of MTA-SZTAKI together with the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BUTE) Department of Control and Transport Automation developed autonomous UAVs, which are able to fly pre-specified routes, taking advantage of modern guidance navigation and control algorithms, implemented on advanced microcomputers. In parallel the Jedlik Laboratories of the Pazmany Peter Catholic University (PPKE) Faculty of Information Technology Cellular Sensory together with the Optical Wave Computing Laboratory of MTA-SZTAKI developed advanced sensing and processing solutions on kilo-processor chips.

In a joint collaboration between MTA-SZTAKI ,PPKE, and BUTE, sponsored by the US Office of Naval Research (ONR), a system is under development, which aims at helping the integration of UAVs into the common airspace by providing "Sense and Avoid" capability. After a one year feasibility study, led by PPKE, a two year program entitled "Sensing-Computing-Navigation Algorithms on kilo-processor Chips - for Sense And Avoid Problems of UAVs" is under research. A collateral two year program entitled: "Developing a new Control and Estimation Hardware-Algorithm-Software Framework for Sense and Avoid Problems of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles" led by MTA-SZTAKI, has been officially launched in October 2011. Using a camera based system UAVs will be able to detect, track and identify surrounding air traffic, including potential collision threats. Using this information the autopilot onboard the UAV will be able to redesign its own route to avoid collision and provide adequate separation from surrounding traffic.

The expertise of Prof. Tamás Roska’s group in cellular parallel computing architectures and sensory array computing, coupled with the expertise of Prof. József Bokor’s group in advanced navigation and control methods will lead to an extension of current solutions to orders of magnitude more efficient, lightweight systems, providing a benchmark for future, vision only, sense and avoid systems.