About the U²TM Project

“Many scientists parallel unmanned systems today to where we were with ‘horseless carriages’ back in 1909-1910, at the start of something so big we can only wrap our minds around what it is not. That is, automobiles and the resulting mechanization didn’t just become change industry and warfare, it also […] led to the requirement of new laws, ‘traffic laws.’ The point here is that every so often in history, the emergence of a new technology changes our world. “

– Peter Singer, Ph.D.

Within the last few years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have developed from research and military applications to commercial industries and hobbyists. With this increase in aerial traffic, concerns have arisen about the safety of the autonomous drones. NASA has been leading the charge for federally regulating the air space to avoid collisions and ease adoption of the regulations for the public. In late 2015, initial registrations began for vehicles over 0.5 pounds. Over 300,000 pilots had registered by January 22, bringing the estimated number of drones close to 2 million with many more unregistered to date. In addition to these individual pilots, companies such as Amazon are working to make drone delivery services available to the public for daily use.

The U²TM (UNR UTM) project is the client side application to NASA’s UTM server. U²TM’s main goal is to communicate with the NASA UTM server for client side applications. Specifically, the client application must be able to post requests for airspace by submitting flight plans and receive confirmation for continuation or halting orders. The service itself compares air traffic requested in the area to make decisions, evolving into a public service much in the same vein as air traffic inquiries for traditional, manned vehicles. A public-facing client software will take the requests, format, and post them to the server. Additional RESTful web services such as reporting and collecting broadcast messages will also facilitate communications.

In a broad sense, this project will directly benefit the public in managing unmanned air traffic to keep it constrained to safe zones and facilitate coordination, reducing collisions and improving reporting and security. The U2TM project is aimed toward users who wish to request airspace for their operations. A certain amount of technical grasp is assumed to the current drone controllers; however, these more technically-inclined users may not be the norm in the future as drone companies provide their offerings to the general public. A user-friendly, graphic system will be implemented for quick and intuitive understanding of the various command codes distributed by the UTM system. A map system will provide quick, visual representation of the vehicle’s proposed flight plan and alerts from the main system. Additional safety features could be form requests to further mitigate illegal requests.

NASA has further plans over the next 15 years to further develop this system for heavier traffic loads predicted by the rapid growth drone popularity. Specifically, weather systems and low-altitude communications are proposed on the NASA website. Each of these tasks can be further experimented with as the semester passes beyond CS425. Overall, the project promises much in the way of high-visibility growth and development with a clear need to be implemented and maintained for the general public.