ADS-B Surveillance Application for RPAS DAA System

Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast equipment is increasingly becoming a fundamental means to support cooperative surveillance in the aviation section, including both manned conventional aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles. The importance of the ADS-B is further increased by its ability to support Detect and Avoid (DAA) systems, which are able to act both as decision support systems for human pilot onboard manned vehicles and for remote pilots in case of Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) and as automatic systems implemented onboard unmanned aerial vehicles performing fully automatic missions. Such considerations emphasize that the ADS-B technology is able to play the role of enabling technology for the implementation of single pilot operations on manned vehicles and for the integration of unmanned vehicles (totally automatic or remotely piloted) into the Air Traffic Management (ATM) system. In this paper, a system is outlined that has been designed by CIRA in order to exploit the ADS-B as cooperative surveillance sensor supporting the Detect and Avoid applications. In particular, the systems that is here outlined is an integrated system for Separation Assurance and Collision Avoidance, designed for the implementation in the RPAS domain. In the paper, therefore, first a review of the evolution of the CIRA designed system for DAA is provided and, then, an outline of the ADS-B based DAA systems is reported. Finally, some numerical applications are indicated to show the system behavior.