Improved UAS Robustness Through Augmented Onboard Intelligence

It is the goal of this technology to greatly reduce the amount of training and expertise needed to fly UAS, and enable operators such as NASA scientists to directly conduct field campaigns without sacrificing safety. Within NASA, this capability will allow wider adoption where UAS can be operated with less training, less focus on maintenance, and more focus on the data and information gathered by the aircraft. This will be enabled by automatically communicating the need for specific routine maintenance to the user. Furthermore, automated warnings and actions in the form of popup checklists on the user interface during flight will reduce the need for expert operators to be able to deal with these contingencies. NASA also has a history of conducting new and difficult missions with UAS in challenging environments, such as the deployment of the Sierra UAS in the Arctic environment and the DragonEye to perform volcanic plume characterization. The proposed system will be designed to extend monitoring capabilities to new types of missions and reduce flight risks, such as the detection of aircraft icing using machine learning approaches. The small size of the proposed system will ensure this type of capability can then be employed in small UAS, enabling operations in areas that would historically be considered too risky. This will enable more frequent and capable flight campaigns for NASA Earth Science missions.

BST aims to utilize the proposed monitoring technology to further lower the barrier of entry and reduce the risk of mission failure due to maintenance mistakes or user error during off nominal flight conditions. Increasing industry confidence in UAS technology is required to continue to grow the market. Furthermore increasing reliability will allow customers to operate increasingly expensive payloads. This will enable more advanced capabilities for UAS, growing the size of the potential market and leading to wider adoption by commercial operators and higher demand for the new capabilities by their customers. As an example, survey and GIS companies can regularly begin using sensors such as GPS RTK and scanning LIDAR without the fear of the prohibitively high cost associated with an accident. These specific sensors will create more demand; there are many areas that need 3D mapping where photogrammetry does not work well due to trees and other vegetation. Those areas are currently rarely serviced by UAS due to the high cost of the sensors. More reliable UAS are also essential for making a safety case with the FAA to allow new types of missions. Reducing failure likelihood due to consistent maintenance and improving flight anomaly detection and mitigation will be important factors in enabling beyond visual line of sight operations and eventually fully autonomous flights without direct human oversight. Many markets and missions will take advantage of these sorts of capabilities. More »