Abstract
Remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS) are increasingly becoming relevant actors that are flying through the airspace and will gain much more importance in the future. In order to allow for their safe integration with manned conventional traffic in non-segregated airspaces, in accordance with the overall air traffic management (ATM) paradigm, specific enabling technologies are needed. As is well known, the detect and avoid (DAA) technology is fundamental among the enabling technologies identified as crucial for RPAS integration into the overall ATM system. In the meantime, to support extended surveillance, the universal introduction of cooperative automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) on-board aircraft is being increasingly implemented because it has the potential to allow for the coverage of the entire airspaces in remote areas not usually covered by conventional radar surveillance. In this paper, experimental results that were obtained through the real-time validation, with hardware and human in the loop (RTS-HIL) simulations, of an automatic ADS-B based separation assurance and collision avoidance system aimed to support RPAS automatic operations (as well as remote pilot decision making) are presented and discussed. In the paper, after an introductory outline of the concept of operations (ConOps) of the system and its architectural organization, in addition to basic information about the main system functionalities, a description of the tests that were carried out is reported, and the obtained results are described and discussed in order to emphasize the performance and limitations of the proposed system. In particular, the obtained quantitative performances are reported and commented on, and the feedback presented by pilots in order to improve the system, e.g., in terms of preferred typology of conflict resolution maneuver elaborated by the system, is described.
Highlights
In the last few decades, remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS) have emerged as relevant and increasingly diffused new actors in air traffic, covering flights that range from very low-level operations to higher flight levels
The remote pilot was a real human pilot commanding the ownship with a dedicated Remote pilot station (RPS), by means of which the pilot could guide the ownship in augmented mode or using the real autopilot panel implemented in the RPS that was installed in the real-time laboratory environment
The paper reported some exemplary experimental results obtained through real-time validation, with hardware and human in the loop (RTS-HIL) simulations of an automatic automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B)-based separation assurance and collision avoidance system (ASACAS) aimed to support RPAS automatic operations and remote pilot decision making
Summary
In the last few decades, remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS) have emerged as relevant and increasingly diffused new actors in air traffic, covering flights that range from very low-level operations to higher flight levels. The SAT concept is addressed in terms of the research and development of solutions allowing for single pilot operations that have the potential to ease the introduction of this aviation transport paradigm as a relevant industry, especially, for instance, in areas of Europe where surface transport infrastructures are not extensively implemented enough and the costs for implementation would be excessively high due to the presence of geographical barriers In such a situation, a solution to increase mobility capabilities would be to implement the extensive use of regional small airports, which are numerous in those areas, by wide number of SAT vehicles that would be piloted under single pilot operations to reduce flight costs and the needed number of qualified crew. Research activities are ongoing under the transversal SAT work package in the Clean Sky 2 EU-funded program, including activities devoted to design of enabling technologies for single pilot operations in SAT vehicles that are carried out in the Cost Optimized Avionic System (COAST) project [4,5]
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