Improving Redundancy and Safety of UTM by Leveraging Multiple Uass

Reliability is one key challenge facing safe widespread integration of UASs within uncontrolled airspaces. We apply system engineering methods to airspace management to explore architectures and operational concepts which can compensate for partial failures and bridge the reliability gap. Our exploration leads to an operational approach which leverages multiple UASs to achieve redundancies. We employ simulation to demonstrate the benefits of operating single-file platoons over fixed routes, in the context of the NASA UAS Traffic Management (UTM). We show that it is possible to simultaneously reduce impact of localization errors, achieve better resilience under degraded communications, gracefully remove from airspace UAS compromised by cyber attacks, improve conflict management and increase airspace capacity. Our multi-agent airspace simulation improves realism using Firmware In the Loop (FITL), Intent Control Loop (ICL) and of execution contingencies as concurrent high priority activities.