Improved UAS Robustness Through Augmented Onboard Intelligence

The overall goal of the technology developed in this SBIR is to aid in enabling ubiquitous operations of UAS in the national airspace. This includes beyond-line-of-sight operations, flights over populated areas, and fully autonomous operations without direct human oversight. This overarching vision will require many new advancements such as collision avoidance capabilities, GPS denied navigation, and improvements in overall system reliability and robustness. The specific technology gap addressed in this SBIR is focused on improving reliability, subsystem failure tolerance, and automated diagnostics. The specific technical objectives of this Phase II include:Finalize and validate the design of the new subsystems including the actuator and battery monitoring nodes, the vision node, and the flight management node.Continued iterative design and testing of machine learning techniques for identifying failures and required maintenance as well as machine learning algorithms for safe landing detection. These will be built and improved using the new hardware and additional flight experiments.Bench-top testing and hardware-in-the-loop simulation of monitoring systems to gather training data, validate sensor selection, processing bandwidth, and algorithm implementationImplementation of new features in the current user interface to alert the operator in an intuitive manner of subsystem failures or required maintenance. This will be based on standards and concepts that have been proven in manned aircraft.Deployment of a customer-facing online portal to iteratively test and deploy algorithms in a commercial space using flight data.Validation of the full system through flight testing on the BST S2 aircraft with analysis on the achieved reliability metrics. This tasks will include early-on flight experiments to gather training data with certain features and failures along with testing of the full system to validate the overall performance towards the end of the Phase II project.