Flight Demonstration for Information Sharing to Avoid Collisions between Small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUASs) and Manned Helicopters

Abstract

This paper describes our work building and testing a concept to share information among operators of manned aircraft and small unmanned aerial systems (sUASs) using the same low-altitude airspace to reduce collision risk, which is an urgent issue due to the rapid growth of sUASs use in many countries. Our concept is to share the positions of manned aircraft and sUASs on a web-based UAS Traffic Management (UTM) platform and provide alerts that give the operators of sUAS sufficient time to land the sUASs before a manned aircraft reaches the designated minimum airspace distance necessary for separation from the sUASs. The purpose of this paper and the flight demonstrations is to investigate the feasibility and problems in building such a platform. This paper also reports on the latest sUAS situations, including regulatory discussions, operations, the experimental environment, and the required regulatory arrangements.