Risk-Based Unmanned Air System (UAS) Mission Path Planning Capability

Near Earth Autonomy and Carnegie Mellon University propose a 7-month Phase I program to develop pre-flight mission planning that minimizes risk to personnel and property while reducing preparation times for a new mission. Significant progress is being made in autonomy for a variety of aircraft that fly safely even when confronted with off-nominal conditions such as obstacles in the flight path, degraded visual conditions, and loss of GPS. Much more is needed, however, to satisfy the levels of safety required for military aviation. It is possible to close some of the gap by improving pre-flight mission planning to create flight missions automatically taking into consideration all of the relevant available information. Timely consideration of annotated digital elevation maps, FAA sectionals, types of property on the ground, no-fly zones, other aircraft flight paths, weather, vehicle dynamics and onboard sensors, etc., will produce flight missions that are low risk. Currently, all of these are conducted manually in a time-consuming process that is hard to update with changing information. Our team will leverage existing work in autonomy for aircraft to conduct 5 tasks culminating in a proof-of-principle demonstration and a plan for a significant result to be produced in Phase II.