Perspectives and Sensing Concepts for Small UAS Sense and Avoid

Abstract

This paper presents an overview and a performance analysis of sensing approaches aimed at providing small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) flying in the low altitude airspace with sense and avoid capabilities. Limited weight, size and power resources represent significant challenges especially considering non-cooperative architectures and avoidance of flying obstacles. An analysis of conflict detection performance levels achievable exploiting different sensing architectures, i.e., based on (compact) radar, LIDAR, cameras and multi-sensor systems, is carried out by means of numerical simulations in which 2D frontal collision scenarios are reproduced. Also, an experimental campaign is planned, aimed to test sense and avoid technologies and algorithms using flight data collected by a fleet of small fixed-/rotary-wing UAS. First analyses regarding the performance of non-cooperative vision-based detection and tracking algorithms in a small UAS scenario are finally presented.