UK moving fast toward virtual pilots, Flight Global.

The UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) is scheduled to publish the first draft of regulatory proposals under Part 23 standards for sense-and-avoid systems and autonomous decision-making by UAS in civil airspace.

This could lead to the adoption of the new standards within 18 months, said Andrew Lucas, managing director of autonomous software company AOS and a member of the autonomous systems technology related airborne evaluation and assessment (ASTRAEA) consortium.

After the standards are adopted as special conditions to Part 23 regulations, industry can start designing compliant systems and vehicles. The specifications will require a certain standard for sense-and-avoid sensors, as well as onboard software algorithms that make rational decisions based on inputs from those sensors. For regulatory purposes, the autonomous software algorithms create a virtual pilot.

The proposed standards are still being written within ASTRAEA and CAA working groups. One key feature of the regulations is already clear, and states that the virtual pilot must survive aircraft power loss caused by single-engine failure, Lucas said. The UAS must have either two engines or a back-up power supply to ensure the virtual pilot can continue to make decisions after the main power supply is lost.

The ASTRAEA consortium has been developing the standards over several years. Experiments have tested a Thales and BAE Systems sense-and-avoid suite on a surrogate unmanned aircraft, with autonomous decision-making software provided by AOS.

The CAA could adopt airspace standards for UAS several years ahead of the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Such regulations are hoped in the UK to give local industry a first-to-market advantage on commercial UAS systems with access to national airspace.

Source : Flight Global