AcrOSS Aims to Make It Safer to Fly Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles in Safety-Critical Controlled Airspace
From better geofencing to augmented reality to provide pilots with improved situational awareness, AcrOSS is safety-focused.
Researchers from the University of Salento's Department of Engineering for Innovation have developed a platform that, they hope, will make it safer to use uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS), including drones flown beyond line of sight, in safety-critical areas: AcrOSS.
"The use of unmanned aerial system (UAS) in congested airspace and/or in the proximity of critical infrastructure poses several challenges as far as safe and secure operations are concerned," the researchers explain of the problem AcrOSS aims to address. "[Our] paper provides a detailed description of the architecture and workflow of a platform for UAS traffic management (UTM), designed to pave the way for increased, improved and safer UAS operations in the civil airspace."
AcrOSS, also known as the Environment for Safe Operations of Remotely Piloted Aircraft, is based on a three-layer architecture: an air traffic management and control (ATM/ATC) layer, a UAS service supplier (USS) layer, and the UAS layer itself. Key to its success: ensuring that uncrewed aircraft don't interfere with other traffic, in both uncontrolled and controlled airspace.
The platform, which includes an augmented reality (AR) system, built around Microsoft's HoloLens platform, designed to give pilots improved situational awareness, a contingency manager to suggest appropriate actions to be taken in the case of unexpected occurrences, and a notification and authorization system, was tested at Italy's Grottaglie-Taranto airport using a commercial DJI Mavic 2 Enterprise Dual quadcopter drone.
"[The test] proved not only the successful implementation of each physical and digital module of the architecture, but also their efficient interactions during a simulated contingency," the researchers claim. "The main limitations concern some possible ergonomic issues of the headset, the communication between certain components, which could be optimized by testing other protocols, and the small number of UAS pilots involved in the tests, which did not allow for more accurate evaluations in terms of usability, user experience, and ergonomics."
The team's work has been published in the journal Engineering under open-access terms.