NASA has sought to use remotely or autonomously operated unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in scientific and commercial applications, particularly to study the Earth's environment with high-altitude, long-endurance UAVs.

The full potential of UAVs cannot be realized, however, until they demonstrate the ability to operate safely and routinely within the existing air-traffic management system.

NASA Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, Calif., in cooperation with Scaled Composites, LLC, Mojave, Calif., has been conducting flight demonstrations of collision-avoidance systems necessary to achieve the "equivalent level of safety" of a piloted aircraft.

The ability to sense and avoid conflict is a key step toward allowing UAVs to fly routinely and reliably in the national civil airspace.

A series of flight evaluations of a "Detect, See and Avoid" system that can detect "non-cooperative" aircraft without operating transponders is scheduled for the first week of April near Mojave, Calif.

As with a prior flight series last year near Las Cruces, N.M., that focused on "cooperative" transponder-equipped aircraft, the primary test aircraft will be Scaled Composites' Proteus.

For this series, the Proteus will be equipped with a 35 GHz radar system intended to detect any approaching aircraft on a potential collision course, regardless of whether the intruder is equipped with an operating transponder.

The Proteus and a variety of target aircraft, ranging from a hot-air balloon to a high-speed NASA F/A-18 jet, will fly 22 different simulated-conflict scenarios over a three-day period.

During the flight demonstrations, Proteus will be controlled remotely by a pilot in a ground station. Radar data will be relayed to the ground station via either a line-of-sight telemetry link or an over-the-horizon satellite link, and the ground pilot will command the Proteus to change course as needed. A vertical offset will be maintained throughout the tests for safety purposes.

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