Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) System for Traffic Situational Awareness

Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) System for Traffic Situational Awareness

Armstrong innovators have developed an ADS-B system for unmanned aerial vehicles. The system relies on highly accurate GPS signals to provide increased situational awareness and a self-separation assurance system to avoid accidents. This state-of-the-art technology automatically broadcasts a UAV's exact position 120 miles in every direction every 1 second, as opposed to legacy radar-based transponder systems that 'sweep' for position every 12 seconds. Accurate to within 5.7 feet,

this Armstrong-developed technology integrates commercial ADS-B hardware, radio data-link communications, software algorithms for real-time conflict detecting and alerting, and a display that employs a geobrowser for three-dimensional graphical representations. Some

manned aircraft already have adopted ADS-B technology. The Armstrong team is the first to apply the system architecture to UAVs.

Work to date: In 2012, the team developed, demonstrated, and validated an ADS-B system integrated into an unmanned aircraft system for increased situational awareness and self-separation assurance.

Looking ahead: The team is working to refine the sense-and-avoid algorithm's conflict detection, trajectory estimation, and prediction capabilities for self-separation assurance.

Benefits

 Improves safety: Enhances sense-and-avoid capabilities to maintain self-separation for UAVs

 Highly accurate and fast: Provides location data that are accurate to within 5.7 feet every 1 second

Applications

 Military missions    Border surveillance and training     

Scientific research  Law enforcement     

Avionics and Instrumentation Technologies

Armstrong innovators design and integrate data acquisition systems for research, support, and one-of-a-kind platforms. In many cases, these systems leverage commercial off-the-shelf parts to keep costs low and ease integration with legacy systems. At the same time, these cutting-edge data systems are finding innovative ways not only to collect data efficiently but also to flexibly configure collection parameters.

Designed for aerospace applications, many of these innovations can benefit numerous industries in a variety of situations where data optimization is critical, such as manufacturing operations, business processes, and energy management, to name a few.