Improvements to Sense and Avoid (SAA) Systems for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS)

Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) across the services need the capability to operate routinely in civil airspace like manned aircraft.Currently, the lack of Sense and Avoid (SAA) technology is the largest obstacle to realizing this capability.The SAA system should autonomously sense air traffic and direct the RPA to avoid the traffic in the same manner as a human pilot.The preceding program demonstrated the feasibility and benefits of using uncooled short wave infrared sensors coupled with innovative detection/tracking/classification algorithms to identify intruding aircraft day or night.This program advances the state of the art by closely integrating the sensor with the processing hardware in a miniature package suitable for deployment on both large and small RPAs.The close integration is achieved through the use of proprietary 3D stacked-die packaging techniques.The resulting prototype Smart SWIR sensor/processor packages will be flight tested on a surrogate RPA (manned aircraft) to demonstrate Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 6.