Civil UAVs Still A Distant Prospect 109
holy_calamity writes "The aerospace industry has failed to obtain the radio frequencies that would allow the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in civil airspace, New Scientist reports. It will be 2011 before it can even begin to lobby for space on the radio spectrum. What's more, no national aviation authority in the world will allow civil UAVs without a system for avoiding other aircraft. And no firm has even started development of one. Has the industry cheated us of the benefits of civil UAVs by focussing on the demands of the military?" From the article: "On the brighter side, last week the UN's International Civil Aviation Organization, based in Montreal, Canada, said its navigation experts would meet in early 2007 to consider regulations for UAVs in civil airspace. That could be a step towards internationally agreed rules for how UAVs should operate. Even if the UN body makes rapid progress, however, it will be meaningless unless the industry can obtain the necessary frequencies to control the planes and feed images and other sensor data back to base."
Re:Waitaminute... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Waitaminute... (Score:3, Interesting)
If I really wanted to, I suppose, I could move the computer (since it doesn't really require anything more than a small PDA- we're not talking magic super processing here) onto the plane itself and just remotely control the control application, if that makes any sense.
Re:Waitaminute... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Waitaminute... (Score:4, Interesting)
As the former chief architect for software on the DARPA/USAF Joint Unmanned Combat Air System (J-UCAS), I can tell you that the public's perception of UAVs have about as much in common with state of the art UAVs as the Wright Flyer has to a F-16. The difference is the degree of autonomy the aircraft exhibits. J-UCAS aircraft (the X-45C and X-47A) were designed to be completely autonomous in their mission execution, from take off to landing. In fact, the ground stations have nothing resembling a joystick. Mission planning is performed prior to take-off and the vehicle is responsible itself for all re-routing and mission contingencies.
The vehicles are configured to support the standard civil avionics elements such as TCAS, digitally encoded transponders, and data links to air traffic control. The only "frequency" challenge has to do with being able to backhaul voice communications with ATC to a human for interpretation and action when operating in airspace that doesn't support digital data links from ATC.
Traffic deconfliction is usually performed by having the UCAS aircraft operate at altitudes specifically assigned for their use. The reality is that with a little work from the FAA to set aside some dedicated altitudes above 30,000' and ensure that ATC centers can all issue routing instructions via data link as well as voice, UAVs can quite happily and safely operate in the national airspace.
The challenge is how (or if) to accommodate older UAV systems such as Predator and Globalhawk, which require man-in-the-loop control and could never be easily retrofitted to operate autonomously because of their need for persistent communications. Smaller UAVs that have performance or weight parameters that move them from the realm of R/C airplanes (and very light-weight UAVs) into the range of what the FAA defines as "aircraft" will have a serious challenge in the civil marketplace until they can adopt the degree of autonomy and ATC interaction that is just now emerging in the state of the art UAV programs.
While current UAV suppliers and operaters are scrambling for frequency spectrum now, this is fundamentally a software and FAA (ICAO) procedural problem in the future. By 2011, we may find that the industry has moved beyond the first generation UAVs and the issue of spectrum allocation becomes moot. We can only hope so, because the man-in-the-loop control model for large UAV platforms is not the desired end state for the industry.