Autonomous Decision Support System for Sense and Avoid (ADeSSSA)

GreenSight’s ADeSSSA is a new sense and avoid system which enables autonomous decision making by UAVs of all sizes in order to actively sense, assess and avoid collisions. GreenSight’s approach uniquely fuses 360-degree visual sensing with acoustic and transponder sensing. While there have been research projects and some early commercial products which have explored this approach, none have created a verifiable framework which can be used to accurately guide autonomous systems. Point solutions, such as those using machine vision or ADS-B receivers, are in limited use but are not robust enough to support safety or mission-critical autonomous services. As a result, no currently available commercial systems provide effective sense and avoid for UAS. GreenSight’s ADeSSSA is a framework which combines multiple sensor modalities (visual, acoustic and transponder) into a probabilistic safety estimate. This information is used to feed autonomous decision systems on an aircraft and guide flight trajectory planning. ADeSSSA will be immediately relevant to small unmanned aircraft, and extensible in the future to more safety critical systems like self-piloting UAM aircraft.

ADeSSSA has potential to positively impact multiple NASA programs directly and indirectly using UAS. NASA has extensive programs on UAS airspace integration and AAM. Some of the specific programs that are relevant and will be furthered by ADeSSSA include: Advanced Air Mobility (AAM High Density VertiPlex (HDV) System-Wide Safety (SWS) Scalable Traffic Management for Emergency Response Operations (STEReO) UAS Traffic Management (UTM)

As operators of UAS that desire to utilize them in mixed airspace, the US DoD and other federal agencies will benefit directly from ADeSSSA. GreenSight completed a project earlier in 2021 using sUAS for airfield safety inspections at military bases. ADeSSSA would allow these systems to detect and react to air traffic in the event of an air traffic management mistake, averting a collision.

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 6) — the most realistic path in is NASA SBIR/STTR, which funds small businesses and research institutions to develop technology aligned with NASA's needs (equity-free, phased funding). Check whether a current SBIR/STTR solicitation topic overlaps with this project's technology area, or contact the project directly (above) to ask.

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