FACET as a Collaborative, Open Source UAS Research Platform

We build a tool that accelerates Research and Development (R & D) aimed at introducing Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) into the National Airspace System (NAS). In the proposed effort, FACET will form the basis of a collaborative R & D platform, an environment where users can share open source software modules (software and data sets developed to reside outside the FACET Application Programmers Interface (API)) between users at the same or different universities, so that each user can benefit from the open source software and data contributions of others. Thus, when a student who has never used FACET before enters into a collaborative study of UAS integration in the NAS, he/she is able to download open source software and data to get going on rich R & D experiment without having to start from scratch. A student can download weather data sets, Special Use Airspace (SUA) data, air traffic demand data, UAS models (e.g., Base of Aircraft Data (BADA)) and flight plans, metrics, or anything that is posted on the open source library, to get a "running start" with R & D. When completing innovative modules outside the API, the student can post software to the open source repository for others to benefit. This collaborative environment will also allow for FACET-based research to be performed in a distributed manner?where simulations at one university may be run with models and parameters provided by other users at different universities, and the results posted back to the common repository for all users to share. This open-source collaborative platform is demonstrated on R & D problems aimed at introducing