Surrogate UAV prepares for maiden flight in UK airspace

A Jet­stream air­craft known as ‘The Fly­ing Test Bed’, which can fly as if it were a UAV (Unin­hab­it­ed Air Vehi­cle), is under­go­ing a series of flight tri­als in prepa­ra­tion for the first maid­en flight of a sur­ro­gate UAV in UK shared air­space lat­er this year.

 -
Click to enlarge
 -
Here you can find more infor­ma­tion about: 

The air­craft will fly using Instru­ment Flight Rules under air traf­fic con­trol. In prepa­ra­tion, tri­als tak­ing place this month include the world’s first use of autonomous, vision-based weath­er-avoid­ance rout­ing and the first UK sur­ro­gate flight of a ful­ly func­tion­al visu­al sense-and-avoid sys­tem which includes col­li­sion avoid­ance tests using a sec­ond air­craft. This tri­al will begin to demon­strate to reg­u­la­tors such as the Civ­il Air Author­i­ty and air traf­fic con­trol ser­vice providers, the progress made towards achiev­ing the safe use of UAVs in UK airspace. 

The new tech­nol­o­gy is part of a suite of inno­va­tions being brought togeth­er for the first time as a UK indus­try-led pro­gramme known as ASTRAEA (Autonomous Sys­tems Tech­nol­o­gy Relat­ed Air­borne Eval­u­a­tion & Assess­ment); a UK indus­try-led con­sor­tium focus­ing on the tech­nolo­gies, sys­tems, facil­i­ties, pro­ce­dures and reg­u­la­tions that will allow autonomous vehi­cles to oper­ate safe­ly and rou­tine­ly in civ­il air­space over the Unit­ed Kingdom. 

Lam­bert Dopping-Hep­en­stal, the Engi­neer­ing Direc­tor at BAE Sys­tems respon­si­ble for the ASTRAEA pro­gramme said: “The use of a sur­ro­gate Unin­hab­it­ed Air Vehi­cle allows pro­to­type autonomous sys­tems devel­oped by the ASTRAEA team to be eval­u­at­ed safe­ly in the air. The BAE Sys­tems Jet­stream Fly­ing Test Bed has been con­fig­ured as a “sur­ro­gate UAV’ where the on-board pilots can take their hands off the con­trols and hand over con­trol to the on-board sys­tem devel­oped by the ASTRAEA team. Racks of com­put­ers and con­trol sys­tems in the rear of the air­craft mean it can fly as if it were a UAV with­out any input from the pilots. 

He con­tin­ued: “The ASTRAEA sys­tem is capa­ble of pre­vent­ing mid-air col­li­sions with oth­er air­craft using a ‘sense and avoid’ sys­tem, detect­ing and avoid­ing bad weath­er con­di­tions and relay­ing air traf­fic con­trol instruc­tions to the remote pilot via satel­lite to the ground con­trol sta­tion. The weath­er avoid­ance sys­tem will use sophis­ti­cat­ed image pro­cess­ing tech­niques to detect and avoid clouds and is just one of the new capa­bil­i­ties being test­ed onboard the Jetstream.” 

From now and until the win­ter, the ASTRAEA sys­tem on-board the Jet­stream will be put through its paces, in a series of at least 20 flight tests over the Irish Sea and through UK airspace. 

Source:
BAE Systems 

Team GlobDef

Seit 2001 ist GlobalDefence.net im Internet unterwegs, um mit eigenen Analysen, interessanten Kooperationen und umfassenden Informationen für einen spannenden Überblick der Weltlage zu sorgen. GlobalDefence.net war dabei die erste deutschsprachige Internetseite, die mit dem Schwerpunkt Sicherheitspolitik außerhalb von Hochschulen oder Instituten aufgetreten ist.

Alle Beiträge ansehen von Team GlobDef →