The autonomous operation of Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (UAS) beyond the pilot in command's visual line of sight is currently restricted due to a lack of cost-effective surveillance sensors robust enough to operate in low-level airspace. The current sensors available either have have high accuracy of locating targets but are too short of a range to be usable or have long ranges but have gaps in coverage due to varying terrain. Sensor fusion is one possible method of combining the strengths of different sensors to increase the overall airspace surveillance quality to allow for robust detect and avoid (DAA) capabilities; enabling beyond visual line of sight operations.
This thesis explores some of the current techniques and challenges to use sensor fusion for collision avoidance between crewed aircraft and UAS. It demonstrates an example method of sensor fusion using data from two radars and an ADS-B receiver. In this thesis, a test bed for ground-based airspace monitoring surveillance is proposed for a low cost method of long-term sensor evaluation. Lastly, an potential method of a heterogeneous, score-based, sensor fusion is presented and simulated. / Master of Science / Long range operations of Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (UAS) are currently restricted due to a lack of cost-effective surveillance sensors that work well enough near the ground in the presence changing terrain. The current sensors available either have have high accuracy of locating targets but are too short of a range to be usable or have long ranges but have gaps in coverage due to varying terrain. Sensor fusion is a solution to this problem by combining the strengths of different sensors to allow for better collision avoidance capabilities; enabling these long range operations.
This thesis explores some of the current techniques and challenges to use sensor fusion for collision avoidance between crewed aircraft and UAS. It demonstrates an example method of sensor fusion using data from two radars and an ADS-B receiver. In this thesis, a test bed for ground-based airspace monitoring surveillance is proposed for long-term sensor testing. Lastly, an potential method of a sensor fusion using different types of sensors is presented and simulated.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/107482 |
| Date | 07 January 2022 |
| Creators | Post, Alberto Martin |
| Contributors | Aerospace and Ocean Engineering, Woolsey, Craig A., Coggin, John M., Joerger, Mathieu |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf, application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document |
| Rights | Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
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