The Urgent Race to Deconflict Drone Airspace

Video Above: Army Research Lab Advances AI to Land Drones on Tanks

By Kris Osborn – President & Editor-In-Chief, Warrior Maven

Dodging enemy fire, tracking fast-moving enemy targets, surveilling enemy formations and even firing precision weapons, are all extremely complex technological tasks to accomplish, yet these things are now woven into the fabric of successful mission execution.

Deconflicting Drone Airspace 

Deconflicting airspace to deliver a pizza in a civilian urban environment, however, is actually more difficult in certain key respects. It is a task the FAA and its industry partners such as Raytheon have vigorously embarked upon with urgency, given the extent to which drones are proliferating around the globe.

In an effort to identify and engineer new technical standards and computer applications to enable beyond-line-of-sight, deconflicted drone flight in a civilian environment, Raytheon and the FAA

“At Raytheon, we provide the Air Traffic Control systems that are used at every airport in the country today, safety critical systems. If we can show that we are using the same technologies that are being used to control 100 million dollar aircraft flying hundreds of people through the skies today, then there is hope they can draw a corollary between that and the safety case for drones flying over your neighborhood,” Kip Surio, Raytheon added.

The goal is to not only enable multiple small drones to operate without conflict in close proximity in uneven terrain or urban environments but also facilitate breakthrough levels of “beyond-line-of-sight” operations.