Small UAS Demand Estimation

Under the UAS Traffic Management (UTM) program NASA plans to investigate procedures that can make sUAS operations for all stakeholders. Safety and operations studies under UTM will require accurate trajectories for sUAS. Currently, only a few sUAS flights are being operated under permission from the FAA. Consequently, there is a lack of large datasets of sUAS flights and trajectories available to conduct high fidelity simulations and analyses, which provide import insights into various aspects of UAS operations: regulations, safety and security enabling technologies, business models, risk analyses, and so on. To this end, we propose to develop technology that will generate credible future demand for small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS) missions. The technology will consist of three parts: 1) a socioeconomic demand modeling system that translates inchoate mission profile information into overall demand for sUAS, 2) translation of the overall demand into specific flight data sets, specifying the origin, destination, scheduled departure and arrival times, as well as the type of aircraft flown along the route, and 3) a data warehouse system that will store the flight data sets and allow analysts to retrieve them to support custom sUAS studies

The proposed demand datasets have a wide variety of application for NASA Conduct safety analyses of sUAS operations as part of UTM project Incorporate our data into a modeling and simulation platform of choice Investigate the safety and efficiency impacts of policy changes on sUAS operations Test and validate Minimum Operational Performance Standards (MOPS) for sUAS

We envision our data to be used by private research organizations; by UAS manufacturers as a basis of their own business cases for building sUAS. We also expect the insurance industry to be a customer for this product. Insurance companies are expected to pay close attention to the risk to life and property that goes along with sUAS flights and tailor their prices

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 3) — 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.

None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.