Verification column

Abstract

The technical column on verification presents an invited contribution by César A. Muñoz, Aaron Dutle, Anthony Narkawicz, and Jason Upchurch at NASA Langley Research Center titled Unmanned Aircraft Systems in the National Airspace System: A Formal Methods Perspective in the July issue of the SIGLOG newsletter. In the past few years we have seen a dramatic increase in the number of hobbyist unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). In addition we have seen a push by several companies including Amazon to use UAS as a package delivery mechanism. The increasing numbers of UAS in our current airspace have introduced a new safety challenge. There have been some high-profile incidents that were reported widely in the media. One example was a drone being 100 feet within an commercial airliner at the JFK airport in New York in Aug 2015, while another was a near miss at the Los Angeles airport between a Lufthansa passenger jumbo jet and a UAS in March 2016. These are however not isolated incidents. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) records shows that there are hundreds of close calls between airplanes and UAS in the US airspace. Similar reports have been documented in the UK and Europe. This safety concern has prompted the development of a detect and avoid capability for the UAS that is designed to avoid aircraft in its vicinity. The article presents the work being done at the NASA Langley Research Center Formal Methods group in Hampton Virigina. I am very excited for this article to appear in the SIGLOG newsletter. This article I believe will be of interest to people not only in the logic, formal methods, and verification community but a broader and more general audience as well.