An industry partnership of unmanned aircraft, airborne surveillance, cellular telecommunications and satellite imagery companies has completed initial testing of an airspace management system for small drones. The Federal Aviation Administration and NASA are assessing the system through their “Pathfinder” and Unmanned Aerial System Traffic Management (UTM) efforts, respectively.

Drone data collection and analysis company PrecisionHawk, Verizon, Harris Corporation and DigitalGlobe announced the completion of initial testing on October 26. Their approach uses PrecisionHawk’s Low Altitude Traffic and Airspace Safety (LATAS) airspace management platform operating over Verizon’s 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution) cellular network and through satellites. The system draws nearby aircraft position information from Harris’s automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) network, and terrain and ground obstacle awareness from DigitalGlobe’s geospatial data service.

PrecisionHawk said it started testing drone tracking over the cellular network this summer, and continued testing over the past few months as part of the NASA program. The company has fitted its Lancaster fixed-wing drone with an ADS-B transmitter, and it has also used DJI and 3D Robotics models for LATAS testing. In November under FAA authorization, it will begin beyond visual line-of-sight testing of drones in North Carolina, "just a few minutes away from our office in Raleigh."

“LTE networks have the potential to allow drones to deliver sensor data for processing, analysis and decision-making mid-flight and to receive command-and-control inputs in real time, resulting in a safer, more reliable shared airspace,” said David Famolari, Verizon Ventures director. “While much further study is required, this demonstration is an important step in advancing industry efforts to safely manage commercial UAV operations at scale.”

The companies said the airspace management “ecosystem” is being assessed as part of an FAA Pathfinder drone research program involving PrecisionHawk, cable network CNN, BNSF Railway and more recently security system provider CACI International. It is also being evaluated as part of NASA’s UTM effort to routinely manage low-flying drone traffic by 2030. NASA plans to achieve the UTM vision in four increments, or software builds, supporting spacing, collision avoidance and trajectory management functions for increasingly dense levels of drone traffic. It conducted a first-build demonstration in late August at Crows Landing Airport in central California to prove the concept.