By Philip Butterworth-Hayes
The first public demonstrations of drone flights, simulated eVTOL operations and manned flight operations “flying” simultaneously within unsegregated airspace and managed within a decentralised UAS traffic management (UTM) have taken place today as part of the SESAR AMU-LED very large demonstration project at the UK’s Cranfield University.
Two UTM service providers – ANRA and Cranfield’s ATM/UTM Lab – provided UTM/U-space support, exchanging telemetry feed data and strategic de-confliction data while accessing the discovery and synchronisation service (DSS) data via the ASTM F3548 standard.
Under the decentralised U-space architecture the common information service is the source of operational intent, traffic data and conformance alerts but competing/cooperating U-space service providers (USSPs) exchange data on flight plans (for strategic deconfliction), dynamic traffic data and their own conformance alters.
This is the first stage of AMU-LED flight trials using both centralised and decentralised U-space architectures and the results will be published at the end of the project later this year.
