SCIENTIFIC SYSTEMS CO INC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase II: SB151-006

Description

For UAS to operate autonomously in airspace that may contain other aircraft and is beyond the range of surface radars and manual intervention, they must autonomously detect potential air-to-air collision threats in time to react to them, and robustly across operating conditions. Larger UAS operating in benign conditions can meet this need with RF-based technologies (e.g., radar or ADS-B), but smaller UAS require low SWaP-C options, and harsher conditions (e.g., EMCON or A2AD) require complementary, non-RF sensing options. Recently, new optical sensors and bio-inspired vision processing technologies based on the principle of Time-to-Contact (TTC) have shown great promise in improving detection ranges and initiating avoidance actions. Testing on flight data in previous SBIR work demonstrated successful collision threat detection and evaluation under limited operating conditions. We propose to enhance TTC-based algorithms to detect and evaluate collision threats across a wide range of operating (imaging, threat, and environmental) conditions, using optical sensors and external measurements that may be available from RF sensors on larger UAS. We will evaluate the performance envelopes of these algorithms across operating conditions and UAV classes. We will instantiate the algorithms using low SWaP-C, COTS hardware and verify real time, autonomous, collision threat detection and evaluation.