Safe Autonomous Flight Environment (SAFE50) for the Notional Last '50 ft' of Operation of '55 lb' Class of UAS

Our CIF project is built from an inter-disciplinary foundation and provides a leap beyond state of practice using feasibility assessment in realistic flight environments of high risk technologies from robotic hardware, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and innovative real-time algorithms. A key part of our study involves deliberately selected feasibility questions and validation of these targeted approaches by flying in realistic environments. The questions are: (1) Can on-board sensors and compact CFD models provide sufficiently accurate and robust wind estimates? (2) How well can dynamic obstacles be characterized using combinations of cameras and light detection and ranging (LIDARs) in real-time? (3) Is on-board information fusion for real-time decision-making and safe trajectory generation and management sufficiently robust? Deliverables: Three Validated Technologies, set of open source software, models, and knowledge documents. More »