Drone Testing
“One of our big goals up here is large
scale cargo delivery – we see small
package delivery as a novelty”
If you want to prove your drone can inspect a
bridge in the middle of nowhere, fly
hundreds of pounds of supplies into a remote
airport, search for wildlife, inspect a
pipeline, look for a missing boy or survey a wildfire,
where do you go?
The University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) had
already been testing drones for civil aviation use for 12
years when the FAA selected it as one of its UAS test sites
in 2013. Recently, Alaska became the site for the first
FAA-approved flight of a civil drone beyond visual line of
sight (BVLOS) without human observers on the ground.
During the flight test on July 31 this year, operators flew
a Skyfront Perimeter Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV)
quadcopter about six kilometers for 30 minutes along the
Alyeska trans-Alaska pipeline. During the flight
operators used onboard and ground-based detection
systems to avoid other aircraft.
BVLOS operation is the holy grail for the
development of small drones. Once it can be achieved
safely, drones can carry out inspections or deliver
packages to homes remotely and autonomously – even at
night or while flying over people. This requires detect
and avoid technology (D&A). The drone industry and the
20 DECEMBER 2019 \\ AEROSPACETESTINGINTERNATIONAL.COM
FAA are working to come up with a technical means
for a drone to detect and avoid other drones and
aircraft without being piloted by a human.
DATA VISION SOURCES
The Perimeter UAV used for the first FAA-approved
BVLOS flight was equipped with an Iris Automation
Casia electro-optical sensor that can see and identify a
Cessna at two kilometers. It uses an off-the-shelf camera
and computer vision software. Alexander Harmsen, the
CEO of Casia, the Silicon Valley start-up that invented
the sensor, says it has already showed its superiority over
human vision during a different exercise in Alaska. In
that test, it detected a Cessna converging on a drone at
low altitude from different angles 95% of the time before
human observers on the aircraft spotted the Cessna.
For the BVLOS test, UAF researchers mounted
Echodyne phased array radars on the ground as backup
sensors. Echodyne makes a compact, solid-state, beamsteering
radar sensor using Metamaterial Electronically
Scanning Array (MESA) technology.
Metamaterials are composites made using printed
circuit board manufacturing processes with materials
like plastic and metal to produce geometric properties
400ft
altitude of the drone
in the first
FAA-approved
BVLOS flight
1 // A drone flew six
kilometers along the
Alyeska trans-Alaska
pipeline in the first FAA
approved BVLOS flight test
(Photo: University of Alaska
Fairbanks / Sean
Tevebaugh)
2 // Echodyne’s beam
steering radar was used as
backup in the latest drone
detect and avoid tests at
the University of Alaska
Fairbanks
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