SeFAR Integration TestBed for See and Avoid Technologies

Abstract

For unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) to operate freely in national airspace (NAS), they must have an on-board see and avoid (SAA) system capable of providing an “equivalent level of safety” (ELOS) to manned aircraft. Northrop Grumman had developed and validated through extensive computer modeling and simulation such SAA requirements, preferred sensing suites, and system architecture concepts in the recently completed Autonomous Flight Control Sensing Technology (AFCST) program funded by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). Following a successful completion of the AFCST program, Northrop Grumman is further developing a hardware-in-the-loop (HWIL) integration test bed under the Sensing for UAV Awareness (SeFAR) program also funded by AFRL. The SeFAR objective is to verify the SAA system attributes identified by AFCST through additional real-time algorithm and software development and their implementation and integration into a realistic HWIL simulation environment including hazardous failure conditions and associated safety measures. This paper describes the SeFAR test-bed architecture and the associated hardware and software designs.