Small UAS Demand Estimation

Under the UAS Traffic Management (UTM) program NASA plans to investigate procedures that can make sUAS operations for all stakeholders. Safety and operations studies under UTM will require accurate trajectories for sUAS. Currently, only a few sUAS flights are being operated under permission from the FAA. Consequently, there is a lack of large datasets of sUAS flights and trajectories available to conduct high fidelity simulations and analyses, which provide import insights into various aspects of UAS operations: regulations, safety and security enabling technologies, business models, risk analyses, and so on. To this end, we propose to develop technology that will generate credible future demand for small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS) missions. The technology will consist of three parts: 1) a socioeconomic demand modeling system that translates inchoate mission profile information into overall demand for sUAS, 2) translation of the overall demand into specific flight data sets, specifying the origin, destination, scheduled departure and arrival times, as well as the type of aircraft flown along the route, and 3) a data warehouse system that will store the flight data sets and allow analysts to retrieve them to support custom sUAS studies More »