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Lockheed Martin Demonstrates Airspace Deconfliction of Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Written by thomas · Filed Under Aeronautics News 

August 25, 2008

thomas

CHERRY HILL, N.J., Aug. 25 /PRNewswire/ — Lockheed Martin’s (NYSE:
LMT) Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Airspace Management System (UAMS) solved one
of the more difficult challenges facing military services and their
industry partners by successfully demonstrating the ability to deconflict
groups of in-flight UAVs during a test near Pittsburgh, PA.

Sponsored by the Army’s Aviation Applied Technology Directorate, a team
lead by Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories (ATL) developed
UAMS as a battalion echelon system that deconflicts flight paths of
multiple, small UAVs with limited on-board sensors, communications and
processing resources. UAMS also uses its own on-board sensors to
“see-and-avoid” obstacles and other aircraft.

“The successful use of UAMS on in-flight UAVs caps three years of
program development,” said David Van Brackle, ATL’s UAMS project manager.
“Our work will improve safety and mission success for future UAV systems
and for the Warfighters who depend upon them.”

UAMS uses a ground-based airspace manager and UAV-based intelligent
software agents to distribute the problem of airspace management. The
system separates deconfliction into three activities: maintaining
situational awareness and common, relevant operating picture; detecting
conflict; and modifying flights paths. UAMS performs these activities on a
centralized server or distributes them to the UAVs for deconfliction. It
can also use a combination of both techniques, dynamically shifting among
the three performance approaches based on the situation, user-defined
policies based on terrain, communications load, server load, and other
factors.

UAMS also uses sensor input to detect and react to obstacles, giving
the UAV a “see-and-avoid” capability, allowing the UAV to react quickly
while UAMS deconflicts the new path with other UAVs.

UAMS works over a range of operational environments, from large rolling
terrain to smaller urban airspaces.

For the program, ATL developed the distributed,
vehicle-information-management technology, concept of operations, and
systems engineering. Teammate SRI provided avoidance-planning algorithms,
and teammate SkEyes provided key avoidance sensor capabilities, including
forward-looking, conic, laser radar and acoustic sensors.

Headquartered in Bethesda, MD, Lockheed Martin is a global security
company that employs about 140,000 people worldwide and is principally
engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture, integration and
sustainment of advanced technology systems, products and services. The
corporation reported 2007 sales of $41.9 billion.

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