Airspace Management and Deconfliction of Networked UAV

ISX Corporation, in cooperation with SRI International, proposes a research effort to develop a UAV Airspace Management System (UAMS). UAMS will use advanced artificial intelligence techniques for airspace plan generation and repair in a network aware communications framework. UAMS will consist of 2 major components. One component, the UAMS Planner, will handle plan generation and monitoring. The other component, the UAMS Information Dissemination Layer (UIDL), will handle coordinating communications necessary for airspace control. The UAMS Planner will implement AI reasoning procedures for Airspace plan generation, monitoring and repair. The UIDL will implement an agent-based framework for intelligent information dissemination based on the DAIDS effort. The UIDL will have the following functions:  Dynamic team formation  Dissemination policy generation.  Communications adaptation. UAMS will use the most advanced AI techniques available in generating, monitoring, and repairing UAV airspace management plans. The quality of the generated plans and the ability to rapidly detect and fix conflicts will allow the highest degree of flexibility in UAV operations possible. It will use a software agent-based intelligent information exchange framework to minimize the amount of bandwidth required for airspace coordination, and will be adaptable to support centralized, distributed, or hybrid control protocols