ALBERT

Description: NASA's UAS Traffic Management (UTM) Project has been tasked with developing concepts and initial implementations for integrating and managing small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) into the low altitude airspace. To accomplish this task, the UTM Project planned a phased approach based on four Technical Capability Levels (TCLs). As of this writing, TCL4 is currently in development for a late Spring 2019 flight demonstration. This TCL is focused on operations in an urban environment and includes the handling of high density environments, large-scale off-nominal conditions, vehicle-to-vehicle communications, detect-and-avoid technologies, communication requirements, public safety operations, airspace restrictions, and other related goals. Through research and testing to date, NASA has developed an architecture for UTM that depends on commercial entities collaboratively providing services that are traditionally provided by the Air Navigation Service Provider (ANSP) in manned aviation. A key component of this architecture is the UAS Service Supplier (USS), which acts as a communications bridge between UAS operators and the ANSP when necessary. In addition, the collection of USSs form a USS Network to collaboratively manage the airspace through the sharing of data and the adherence to a standard or set of standards required to participate in this USS Network. This document provides a record of the second of four planned steps in the development of interoperable USSs that will ultimately support TCL4 flight testing and formalization of the overall UTM concept. To develop these USSs and their underlying specifications, NASA has planned a series of "Sprints" to work with industry partners in implementing the features and develop proposed specifications for USSs in order to to participate in TCL4. This report describes Sprint Two. In this Sprint, there was a major theme with four goals. The theme was the development and testing of a new USS discovery system, to better enable USSs to find and communicate with each other. The goals supporting this theme were: participants needed to implement and exercise the discovery service for USS-USS communications; USSs needed to demonstrate strategic deconfliction through operation sharing; the systems were to use discovery to aid in handling off-nominal operations; and finally, there was an investigation of an initial off-nominal reporting capability.

Description: NASA collaborated with industry partners to develop and test the small Unmanned Aircraft System (sUAS) Traffic Management (UTM) research platform, a software prototype used for developing airspace integration requirements for sUAS operations. The lessons learned from these activities will help inform the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on what is needed to safely manage sUAS operations. A core component of the UTM platform is the UAS Service Supplier (USS), which acts as a communications bridge to meet the regulatory and operational requirements. As the UTM partners began USS flight tests, NASA found that it was difficult to get all USSs functioning at comparable quality levels to ensure successful flight tests. Also, NASA anticipated that the FAA would encounter similar challenges when they begin to register USSs for operational use. These realizations led to the development of USS Checkout, a set of processes and tools designed to increase flight test efficiency. We learned that a good USS Checkout process is balanced for simplicity versus test coverage, and is amenable to automation. We also learned that when USS Checkout is a USS prerequisite for flight tests, flight tests were more efficient and effective.