Amazon Foresees Safe, Segregated Airspace for Small UAS

Advertisement

Amazon Prime Air cofounder Gur Kimchi. Photo: AUVSI.




Amazon is proposing an airspace management system that would include segregated airspace for small unmanned aircraft below 400 feet, with a high-speed corridor allowed between 400 and 200 feet for package delivery and other services.



Gur Kimchi, cofounder of Amazon’s Prime Air unmanned delivery unit, addressed the NASA-AUVSI Unmanned Traffic Management Convention 2015 at NASA’s Ames Research Center on Tuesday and laid out the company’s airspace vision for the future, which he said would not only allow unmanned package delivery but would make the whole system safer.



Airports would remain off limits for small UAS, which could fly “low and slow” under 200 feet and faster and beyond line of sight in the high-speed corridor but would stay under 400 feet. There would be a no-fly zone for aircraft between 400 and 500 feet, and beyond that larger aircraft would operate.



The Federal Aviation Administration’s satellite-based NextGen traffic management system is “great, and we are fully supportive,” Kimchi said, but for small UAS, “we think this is the way to do it.”



For locations that are deemed to be very low risk, such as remote locations, UAS could fly as high as they like, but the area would have be government certified as such, he said.



The Amazon plan also calls for four types of aircraft, dubbed basic, good, better and best. Basic would be radio-controlled aircraft. Good would have an Internet-connected ground station keeping track of air traffic, but the UAS operator would be responsible to avoid other aircraft.



The better category would have the aircraft itself connected to the Internet and receiving alerts, then separating automatically from other aircraft. The best category would include UAS that could automatically detect “non-collaborative” things in the air, such as birds or balloons, and avoid them automatically.



“If you want to be able to operate vehicles beyond line of sight … they must be able to detect non-collaborative targets in the air and on the ground,” Kimchi said.



Kimchi said other things are required to make beyond-line-of-sight flight possible — something that’s essential for Amazon Prime Air’s business model.



One is a geospatial database of known hazards that would be housed online and shared by all UTM command-and-control networks. Another is online, real-time flight planning and management tools. Collaborative sense-and-avoid systems are required at a minimum, along with non-collaborative systems, and, above all, the Internet connections bringing all these together has to be secure.



Kimchi said the non-collaborative avoidance capability is crucial, because even if all the other capabilities are lost, it means the UAS can land itself safely.



“Even if you lose the first four and have just the last one, you have to land, but you’re not going to hit anything in the air or hit anything on the ground,” Kimchi said.



To read Amazon's white papers on small UAS, click on the following:

"Determining Safe Access With a Best-Equipped, Best-Served Model for Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems"

"Revising the Airspace Model for the Safe Integration of Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems"



Managing the Traffic



NASA has been working on the concept of an unmanned traffic management system and is now hosting its second meeting on the issue, although this one is larger than the first with a crowd of around 1,000 attendees. The conference is hosted by NASA and AUVSI’s Silicon Valley Chapter.



Dr. Parimal Kopardekar, NASA’s UTM principal investigator, said, “Everyone will have a drone, and every home will function as an airport at some point in the future, and our goal is go help make that happen.”



NASA has already been working with industry partners on the concept, which still has many variables. Kopardekar said there are options for such a system: The government could do it as a “single provider;” a nongovernment agency could do it, also as a single provider; or their could be multiple providers, either as a mix of state and local government entities or nongovernment agencies.



NASA is kicking off work on the “build one” iteration of the UTM in August, Kopardekar said. That first part will focus on geofencing, or creating no-fly zones; altitude limitations for UAS; and the scheduling of vehicle trajectories — basically the first steps toward a management system. Later builds will include automatic vehicle separation and a Web-based UTM interface.



Edward Bolton, a former longtime NASA official who is now the FAA’s assistant administrator for NextGen, touted the FAA’s ability to meet its deadlines under the NextGen program and said, “We have a cultural change and a mentality that is excited about being aggressive to work together to make things happen.”



He noted that the FAA was born from tragedy, as it was created after a fatal aircraft collision over the Grand Canyon in 1956.



“I do know there will be some tragedies [involving UAS]; there will be problems associated with this technology,” Bolton said. However, he added “I’m confident something good is about to happen in this industry” and said there is a chance to “do things right before a tragedy for once, this time.”



Bolton said the FAA will be able to incorporate the recommendations to its proposed small UAS rule by the end of the year and will take a flexible attitude toward technology integration in the future.



“Whether it’s sense and avoid that’s autonomous or air traffic controllers, it’s about having the right information to the right entity at the right time to separate aircraft. That’s all it is,” Bolton said.

<< Back to the News