A Safety-Aware Ecosystem of Reputable sUAS

The emergent Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Traffic Management system (UTM) requires operators to submit a ‘Performance Authorization Request (PAR)’ describing how the small UAS’ ground assets, services, personnel, training, and maintenance procedures will enable it to perform safely; however, evaluating the PAR is a manually intensive process that does not scale easily. This work will develop a UTM-compatible Safety-Aware Drone Ecosystem (SADE) which supports fully automated authorization decisions for reputation-holding small UAS (sUAS). SADE dynamically builds, tracks, and leverages the reputation of each sUAS, establishes conditions under which an sUAS can enter a specific region of controlled airspace, and is fully privacy-preserving, tamperproof, and resilient. Each sUAS evolves (or devolves) its reputation over time through the collection, aggregation, and analysis of flight data in a Drone Reputation Profile (DRP). On entry into a SADE controlled airspace, the sUAS gives the SADE manager permission to retrieve its DRP from the Certifying Authority, and the SADE Authorization Manager (SAM) uses this data to assess the sUAS’ capabilities to complete the planned mission. The SAM then authorizes, denies, or provides probationary (monitored) access into the airspace. SADE communication is enabled by custom-designed and fabricated onboard specialized integrated circuits (ICs) to provide reliable, chirp-style communication between sUAS and the SAM.

Defining the attributes and algorithms associated with the DRP represents a non-trivial socio-technical challenge that involves eliciting, analyzing, specifying, and ultimately satisfying requirements that span technical issues related to hardware, software, individual stakeholders, and societal concerns. Among other things, authorization decisions made by SADE need to be perceived by humans as fair, transparent, privacy-preserving, and consistent in order to be accepted by the broader sUAS community. On receiving a PAR, the SAM must determine whether a specific sUAS can operate safely under current conditions in the targeted SADE zone. The SAM makes this determination through generating and reasoning over a Safety Assurance Case (aka Safety Case) generated dynamically from a family of safety cases according to the characteristics of the requested flight and its environmental conditions. The Safety Case is a set of hierarchically composed logical arguments that give reason to affirm that safety goals are met under specific environmental conditions, assumptions, and constraints and concrete evidence supporting the argument.

To maintain and evolve an sUAS’ reputation model, we need to collect, monitor, and analyze flight data at various phases of its operation. We adopt a blockchain approach in order to guarantee that saved records are tamperproof, meaning that DRPs will only be updated when predefined, authorized, qualifying events occur; that the records remain encrypted and can only be accessed by authorized entities, and that those entities only access essential and current information that is needed to perform their current task.

Simulation is critical to the sUAS development process. The SADE simulation environment will support experimentation through facilitating the construction of a benchmark data-set of sUAS flights, providing a multi-sUAS simulation environment that can be used by future sUAS developers to test their own sUAS systems and to build and/or improve their sUAS reputations prior to making on-entry requests into a SADE Zone. To support the physical SADE infrastructure, we develop and deploy cloud-based services for supporting all aspects of the decision making and reputation modeling. Finally, we will develop proving ground infrastructure where an sUAS can perform guided maneuvers to demonstrate its capabilities and strengthen its reputation.

SADE will be tested in both simulated and real-world environments across diverse test beds including rural and urban areas.

The rapid increase in the number of sUAS deployed in the National Airspace has led to an escalation in reported incidents, often related to hardware or software failures, human error, or environmental factors such as bad weather or radio interference. Therefore, assessing sUAS flight-readiness upon entry into a controlled zone is critically important for maintaining low-altitude airspace safety. This work will deliver an end-to-end solution for collecting, building, and analyzing drone reputation models against expertly defined safety cases. The infrastructure is designed to scale up to hundreds of thousands of permission authorization requests, and decisions include clear guidance and testing environments to support sUAS manufacturers and sUAS service providers as they design, build, test, and deploy sUAS. Finally, in addition to delivering technical capabilities, the work will engage diverse stakeholders in the process of designing the SADE infrastructure and determining how PAR decisions should be made.

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