Trials for air traffic management of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) are currently ongoing in the United States of America as well as in Europe [1, 2]. While air traffic management will enable UASs to operate more safely beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) by implementing important regulatory control, it will also raise the requirements for the integrity of the underlying UAS control software which needs to reliably execute BVLOS operations under external supervision. Manual flight testing and analysis are common approaches to ensure the reliability and integrity of an UAS. However, manual approaches are slow and costly and thus limit the amount of testing and analysis that can be performed. Approaches for automatic flight data analysis on the other hand have the potential to increase reliability of the UAS control software by accelerating development cycles through extended testing and constant monitoring of the UAS in operation. The extended test data collection and analysis also directly facilitates the certification process of an UAV by providing comprehensive automatically generated reports of safety statistics for regulators.
In this session, I will present how cloud-based tools for automatically uploading, monitoring, and analyzing UAV flight data can be employed to increase the reliability of UASs and to verify the integrity of UAS software. I will address the challenges of developing such tools for large varieties of UAV types and models as well as UAS objectives. I will present how deep learning based automatic flight data analysis has improved the reliability of the open source autopilot software PX4 and elaborate on how it has enabled certification processes with the FAA and equivalent European regulators. Finally, I will show how valuable information for regulators can be extracted from the big amount of cloud data uploaded by users and present analysis results for PX4 from this process.
Prerequisite Skills or Knowledge:
This session intends to benefit a wide audience from the UAV industry and targets manufacturers and operators who are interested in improving the reliability of their UAV and certifying their UAV for BVLOS operations. The session requires some basic understanding of the technical problems faced by UAVs and of the certification process. However, it does not require a profound technical experience and can therefore benefit product managers and business leaders as well as engineers. ect.