UAS News Podcast — 2013-04-05
Transcript
Alright, welcome to the next installment of the UAS News Podcast Series. Where we make history broadcasting the applications of unmanned technologies live. I'm your program host, Patrick Egan. Let's say hello and a warm welcome to our co-host, Gene Robinson.
Gene. Hello, Patrick. How are things going?
We finally got demobbed from our little outing last weekend doing all the boards. I think I have all the blue stem smoke out of my lungs now finally. And well, we had a spectacular time last week. I sure hope that folks enjoyed our little talk that we had out in the field.
Yeah, that was very informative. Again, the common thread with this show that I enjoy is when people get on here and they talk about their passion and how this technology helps that passion. So let's talk about a couple of things going on with the news this week, Gene, that may have caught your attention. I mean, there were a few big items, but maybe there was something that you caught.
You know, it's not one particular thing, Patrick, that I've seen. It's the quantity of things that we've seen. We're seeing more and more press on people actually going out and making breakthroughs and doing some pretty amazing stuff with unmanned aircraft. We end up with the same usual media privacy issues, and we see the very onerous laws that are being passed, but by the same token.
The industry is moving ahead. And again, you know, we've had the FAA online webinar the other day. We've had several announcements of folks that were going for certification and training processes and some very positive things going on. I think that's the key.
I mean, we're seeing a ramp up of more and more UA-related developments taking place. And I think it's very encouraging, but by the same token, I think it kind of stokes the fires of the media and the privacy folks. And I think that some of the things that you and I have addressed years ago about getting those folks involved, and once we get them educated and let them know that we're not actually out looking for them, that we might move ahead. But that's what I've observed here in the last week or so, even being out in the field.
Yeah, I think that's pretty good observation. The webinar was interesting. I listened in on that. And I was a little, it was kind of short.
People got on there. There was actually a lot of time to make comments and ask questions, but I did not realize that we would not be able to have our questions or comments addressed, which was kind of an interesting thing. But I had brought up some points about, you know, during the small unmanned aircraft systems arc, they were talking about having these test centers 30 miles from a charted towered airport or heliport, which would mean that they'd be kind of out in the bone docks because there's airports everywhere.
And to me, it kind of seems if we're going to follow that model, especially flying bigger aircraft, these test centers should be out in the bone docks and privacy shouldn't be too much of an issue. But those were my comments. I did have some feedback from the community. And one of the funnier lines was that someone said that they probably gleaned enough wedge issues during that webinar to slow things down for another two or three years, which I thought was kind of funny.
It's a little negative, but it may be true. I don't know. Besides that, there's lots of good news with lots of things happening. But I don't want to get too caught up on the news this morning because our guests this week are...
This is an interesting topic, and I think it's an important topic because it deals with getting unmanned aircraft systems into the NAS. And so we have our guests this week are Renee Contenarino and Dr. Michael Contenarino and Richard Healing. And I want to bring them on and get this thing rolling.
Usually what we do is customary for us to have our guests give a short biography, a little background about themselves and how they got here. And I think we'll launch right in here. And Renee, is it possible that we could start with you?
Thank you very much, Patrick. My name is Renee Contenarino, former electrical engineer with the Navy and our principal with R-Cubed Engineering. We are a small company that tries to do emerging technology solutions that are very affordable and routinely our size, weight and power aggressive. What we have accomplished by working with a small team is we have demonstrated the first autonomous ADS-B collision avoidance capabilities.
And we have the honorable Richard Healing as part of our team. He'll give a good overview of NextGen and why ADS-B is a very robust technology for both self-separation, collision avoidance and improving safety for UAF integration in the NAS. And we also have Dr. Mike Contenarino, 30 years of sensor expertise.
And he is also our chief engineer and test director. Dick, may I pass it to you?
Yeah, hi, this is Dick Healing. I just wanted to let you know my background as a professional engineer since about 1974, primary mechanical engineering and with a lot of experience in aviation safety from about 20 years working as the head of safety and survivability for the Department of the Navy, subsequently the National Transportation Safety Board. So my focus in approaching this particular issue was the safety aspect of it and ensuring that whatever we attempt to do results in safety improvement in the national airspace, even integrated airspace.
Okay, this is Mike Contenarino. As Rene had mentioned, I've had 30 years' experience working with the US Navy, building aircraft sensor systems for various detection activities. And since my retirement about five years ago, I have focused on collision avoidance systems for small unmanned aerial vehicles. Okay, so everybody's kind of been around for a while.
It sounds like we're all kind of versed in the technologies in airspace and unmanned aircraft. Jumping right in here, maybe we could start with who wants to field the what does ADS-B mean, both the acronym and promise that the technology holds. Dolly, this is Dick. I just have been working in this area for quite some time, but ADS-B was something that was created originally by UPS, and it was an alternate means of providing separation between their aircraft
and other aircraft when TCAS first came into the traffic alert collision avoidance system, first came into use with commercial airlines, and it was a lower cost system.
So what they created was ADS-B, and it was a low cost system. And so it was a low cost system. So what they created was ADS-B. Now, A stands for automatic.
That means that rather than responding to a radar query from a ground radar, this automatically sends its own signal on a time sequence. It's usually once per second. Dependent means that it depends on other inputs, and in this case, the global navigation satellite system, GNSS, provides GPS signals, so this system depends on the global satellites for determining the position of the aircraft. Surveillance means that it listens and hears other aircraft that are transmitting their signals as well.
It also sends its own signal, which is dependent on the GPS satellite system, and at the same time is listening and receiving information on other aircraft. Broadcast is exactly what that means, and that is that it is not a, it's not held to any one point-to-point signal, and that basically means that it's broadcast and everybody can hear that signal within range. So the acronym ADS-B does stand for automatic dependent surveillance broadcast,
and I think the promise of it is based largely on the accuracy that is inherent in GPS positioning, and that would essentially mean that when you go to the ground-based radar system, you have much more accurate position information about the aircraft that are in the picture.
And so, and this was, this was going to be part of the next gen for the NAS. Is that correct?
Was that meant to dovetail with that? Actually, the next gen, which is the next generation air traffic management system, is based on the backbone, if you will, of ADS-B or GPS positioning. And for that reason, the FAA believes that in next gen, when they have much more accurate position information, that the system will be safer because they will have much more accurate position information, and that they can actually manage a larger number of aircraft as the population of aircraft in the system grows.
That's essentially, next gen is basically marking the shift from a ground-based radar sensor system to a broadcast of GPS data by individual aircraft. So the ADS-B, it kind of sets up like a network in the sky. Is that a fair representation?
Actually, the satellite system is really the basis for this whole thing. And the ability to see or receive position information from a number of satellites is key to making ADS-B work. But the ADS-B system is each individual aircraft knows its position and transmits its position once per second, and it receives position data from other aircraft that are within range, and therefore it knows where the other aircraft are around it. The safety, one of the interesting aspects of this is
I think the FAA is taking the position that pilots will have greater situational awareness and will be better able to maintain their own separation without waiting for the FAA to give them instructions on which way to turn or what altitude to take.
I would like to ask, we've heard quite a bit about the spoofing of GPS. Maybe you could address what, is that minimized in the ADS-B system or is it encrypted or are there measures that could be taken that minimize that risk?
Another reason I bring that up is because it's been such big headlines here in the past. Let Dr. Cantorino answer that question, please. Hi, this is Mike Cantorino.
I actually have spent quite a bit of time looking into GPS integrity, if you will, and its impact on collision avoidance systems for UASs. I think absolutely it is a weakness of the system in that if you were to lose GPS, then our aircraft have a difficult time determining where they are and the collision avoidance system would not work very well. The important thing I think to understand is that the spoofing problem for ADS-B collision avoidance is probably not as much of a problem for the safety of the system because
you will still, if you have an aircraft and it's receiving information from all the other aircraft and then someone puts out spoofing signals, you'll be trying to avoid aircraft that are not there, but you still are going to have the tracks of the aircraft that are coming in.
It would take a pretty sophisticated spoofing system to try to cause an aircraft to become in danger. Inconvenient it would be, sure, that would be pretty easy to do. Addressing the spoofing issue in the long term is very important. But currently we have that same situation in terms of spoofing radars or spoofing any other of the electronic signals that we use to maintain the collision avoidance safety of our aircraft.
I believe in the, okay, go ahead. I was going to say you make an important point is that the general public doesn't know that conventional radars and that sort of thing can be fooled. I think that's kind of been glossed over or even overlooked many times, but I'm really pleased to see that you've got a handle on this and you can explain it very eloquently. That was very good.
Thanks. Well, you know, moving on with that, now you guys, there was a presentation on the Internet. It was a webinar and I believe it was entitled, All Weather Sense and Avoid System. And I got to see some of that.
I got a little late as show prep and I was looking at that. So maybe someone could explain what that means and give some information on that. And then also at the end of that explanation, somebody could possibly mention the web address if there is one where they could go and view that webinar. This is Renee Contorino.
The All Weather Sense and Avoid was a an effort funded by the Navy to develop a low cost size weight and power sensitive capability for the small UAS platforms. We looked at the inventory of UASs and 89% of the UASs that we know are going to be in the airspace are going to be very small and are going to have payloads that are severely constrained. What we did was we designed a system with a dual band 109978 radio
and then we leveraged the information that comes out of the ADSB messages and all the information that's captured and we developed an open architecture that allows us to put this capability on any aircraft, GAA, helicopter, UAV.
We also put it on any autopilot. We've flown multiple different autopilots. In fact, two weeks we'll be flying it out in Yuma, Arizona on Ticolo. We also have ported it to multiple displays to show that it can be worked with any kind of display system, whether it's Falcon View, Google or your iPad.
Then we have also demonstrated very comprehensively the ability to process any cooperative information, sensor inputs. Now we're in the next iterations of testing to show how we can airborne capture any of the non-cooperative sensor inputs that are available airborne. Most of this was reviewed and was recorded on the FUSE website and you can input that meeting number. It's 178-43063.
But again, OSAS stands for all weather sensor avoid because whenever you can fly, we can listen, we can process and we can get airborne self-separation, collision avoidance and autonomous features to improve safety. That sounds interesting. Alright, so that sounds like fun too. It sounds like you're heading out to beautiful Yuma, Stan.
I spent some time out there. It was a lot of fun. We won't go into that one right now, but now I have a little bit of insight into ADS-B but let me say my exposure was limited. I was part of the small unmanned aircraft systems arc that the FAA stood up and we did have a gentleman come on and he talked about ADS-B and I remember there being a lot of promise, but at the time this was 2008 or early 2009, there were some issues with the frequencies between GA was using one frequency and the part 121 using another frequency and there were also issues with infrastructure.
Where do we stand today as far as infrastructure and some of the other issues that I mentioned with ADS-B? This is Dick. Let me give you some information about that. First of all, the altitude split that the FAA has determined is going to be at flight level 180 or 18,000 feet MSL and people who fly above that are normally part 121 and business jets and pressurized aircraft that can operate above that altitude.
Everyone operating above flight level 180 will be required to transmit 1090 megahertz, which is the current frequency for most transponders and it's also in the military side, it's the AFF frequency. They're interrogated on 1030 megahertz from ground radars and their transponder transmits a signal back on 1090 megahertz. So the frequency at high altitudes is always going to be the same one that we're
using today. Below that altitude, below flight level 180, general aviation aircraft, light helicopters, other non-pressurized aircraft that have no need to fly above flight level 180 have an option.
They can, if they wish, continue to use a 1090 megahertz transceiver, but they're encouraged to take the new frequency that was established, 978 megahertz, which is primarily intended to unload, if you will, the burden on the 1090 frequency and that is that with everyone on 1090, we really do have a crowded frequency and all the problems that are attended to that. By getting the large number of general aviation aircraft to use 978 megahertz, that will significantly unburden the other frequency
and it should make things work better, but it's not mandatory, it's an option for those aircraft that are flying below 18,000 feet.
In other words, they have an option to use 978. Now why would they do that?
The 978 transceivers are at least the ones that we're aware of today are significantly less costly than the 1090 transceivers and so there's a financial incentive there to use a less costly system. The other thing, the FAA initially said the infrastructure that you mentioned basically consists of across the country, somewhere around 730 ground-based towers or GBT's they call them, ground-based terminal, which is essentially they're taking advantage of cell phone towers that are already in place
and they're mounting the FAA's equipment on there to receive ADS-B messages so they'll know where anybody who's transmitting ADS-B is located with great precision and also to retransmit with TISB, they call it Traffic Information System Broadcast, TISB, they're going to transmit what they have on their radar picture or their screens, they're going to say, okay, we've got traffic in this vicinity and they transmit aircraft in whatever vicinity that they happen to be in to aircraft within a certain range of your own aircraft
and that way you have a picture of those that are close to you.
Additionally, the FAA will be using FISTE, Flight Information System Broadcast, all of these are transmitted from those ground-based terminals, GBT's, and the flight information consists of weather information which would be updated roughly every five minutes and other information of importance such as TFRs, temporary flight restrictions and so forth that are of interest to aviators operating near.
So that infrastructure is not completed at this point but it's substantially completed. I can't tell you exactly how many towers but there must be at least half of them because they're supposed to be completely in place by the end of 2013, fiscal year 2013.
Although I would suspect there will be a little bit behind schedule with some of the things that are going on with sequestration. So that's how it will work. Okay, well that's interesting because that was a big concern for folks that there was a lack of infrastructure. We have a caller that's been holding for a while and I think we'll bring them on and see if they have a question for one of the guests.
Let's see here. Hello caller, do you have a question for one of the guests?
Maybe they've been holding so long that they forgot that they were on the phone. Okay, well we tried. Anyway another thing when I was on the ARC there was a little bit of pushback from the GA community as far as adoption of this technology and wanting to install this technology in aircraft. Some of it was cost, others had alluded to, let's say that they would be tracked and the information would be recorded.
Have you run into any of that pushback or are people starting to embrace this technology because of the potential safety benefit? Renée, do you want to take that?
I'd be happy to. We have had ongoing discussions with many of the professionals that are involved in the aviation community. I use the word professional because that's what most aviation professionals are interested in, and I'm not a big fan of the statement about aviation safety. This is like any other advanced technology.
It needs to be educated. Once individuals learn what ADSB brings to them, improves their situational awareness, improves their ability to really be safer in the airspace, manage the airspace, and have the ability to have very, very robust collision avoidance capability. We've not heard anyone who's pushing back now. Initially, yes, it's going to be so costly, but just like the GPS tools that we all now use, the aviation community is very anxious to get the tools for weather, for traffic, for position data, for improved situational awareness.
This is definitely going to help with workload. I guess even more importantly, many of the professionals now know that this technology is going to be a backbone of the UAV community where the burdens for safety will be on the UAV to make sure that they manage all of the inputs. I think that we're seeing a major shift once people understand the technologies, the availability, the low cost, the improved functionality that we'll give them. You'll definitely see this being embraced.
Our team witnessed this this past summer when we were up in the University of North Dakota flying. The young pilots who were doing the testing for us were all very comfortable with ADSB technology. In fact, their fleet of 120-plus aircraft were ADSB equipped. The young pilots all loved having the capability and when it was removed for testing, they quickly realized how much they came to depend on having that improved situational awareness.
So again, I think you're going to see the young generation of pilots coming down the road are going to anticipate having these tools and will expect to have these tools. I did hear something about an iPad or an iPhone or maybe an Android phone or something as being the interface for this. Maybe we can talk about this for, let's say, let's use GA, how it will be installed if it's something like a handheld GPS that someone might have like you would have a cell phone holder in your car if you're going to have that and that will be the interface for GA.
And then also I'd like to talk about what the interface will be for small unmanned aircraft. Obviously, I can't sit in the cockpit and have it mounted to the windscreen there. So is it going to be on my ground station?
Is it going to be handheld? Will it be on an iPad?
Somebody like to feel that? It's Mike Conferino. I'll be glad to feel that. It's something I guess I'm actually getting some experience with right now.
Clearly, the more people that are participating in the ADS-B, the safer the airspace is going to be. And pilots are realizing that as well. The best situation certainly is where the ADS-B is integrated into a cockpit screen that is built into the aircraft system. But those, for various reasons, are going to be much more expensive than the handheld units that are coming onto the market now.
There are at least four companies offering very small battery-operated ADS-B receivers. And these are dual-band ADS-B receivers. They receive both 1090 and the 978 air traffic. And they make available traffic display for an aircraft.
And that traffic display can be either integrated into the cockpit display or for those aircraft without cockpit displays or they don't have the expense account to afford integrating them in, you can display the information on an iPad or on a GPS unit that may be portable that the pilot has taken on board. A friend of mine has a Piper Cub and he has done just that. He's taken and mounted his GPS unit and his iPhone so that he can easily see it. And he can get his ADS-B traffic display on his iPhone so that he has it for reference as he finds.
That being under $1000 for full implementation will help more people be able to be part of the system. And even though it's not a certified system, the pilot is now still in control and actually still responsible for collision avoidance. But it is permitted for him to use it as an aid in his own assessment of the air traffic situation. So I'm pretty excited that these allow more aircraft to participate in being aware of other traffic.
And as the transmitters become less and less expensive, more and more of these aircraft, including battery operated aircraft, will in fact become participating in the system. That would be the next question too. As a small unmanned aircraft manufacturer, my aircraft weighs four or five pounds. How small are we going to be able to make these transceivers?
Am I going to be able to put one on my plane and have it compliant? This is Mike Contorino again. As a matter of fact, that is absolutely going to be true. One of the advantages of the secondary system, for the small UAF, they would normally be flying below 18,000 feet.
So the power requirement for ADS-D is going to is only to have between, I believe it's about 12 watts minimum transmitted peak power. That's very easy to do in a battery operated device and very low cost. In fact, it's quite a bit less power than your cell phone transmits. So it really comes down to a commercial market to bring the cost down to within a couple hundred dollars.
There are a number of activities ongoing that are being funded through universities and the government to build low cost transmitter units that can in fact be certified by the FAA. So that you now have a fully participating ADS-D transmitter that is small, small being smaller than a cell phone with a battery equivalent to the size of a cell phone battery that can easily be put into small ADS-D aircraft.
So I really think that it's the generation of rules and regulations that is going to keep us from implementing a system faster and not the technology or the cost or the size or the power and weight at this point.
That's certainly some very good news. That's something we've been waiting on for a while. Yeah. As you were talking about that, I actually Googled it and pulled up one company and I think I actually ran a news story about their product the other day and it says here their product is 5.5 ounces and it has all of these different capabilities.
And one other thing that I don't know maybe someone could talk about this capability is there's a synthetic vision altitude heading reference system. Anybody want to talk about that?
Well, I can go ahead and feel that. I haven't actually seen any, I'm not referencing a particular system, but I think we're all aware of the various games that are available out there. And once you have three dimensional aircraft information, it becomes very straightforward to build a fairly realistic three dimensional interpretation of that information. And it has a lot of very powerful parts to it.
The most important thing is that those things that are close to you become bigger and more important than those things that are far away. And so your ability to react to them is considerably improved. You're not distracted by those things that are not necessarily close to you because there are little spots out on the horizon. And then if something gets closer and is more important, you become more aware of it.
And so I think that could be a very powerful approach to improving pilot situational awareness without distracting him from his main job, which is of course flying. And one other thing on this site is the ADSB advisory service map. And this kind of talks about what you were saying about infrastructure. And actually it looks like a lot of the infrastructure in there.
There are large parts of the country that are still without service and parts of Alaska. But I would say that those were probably the more unpopulated regions of the country. So that's kind of interesting. I guess not keeping up on it.
I didn't know that we were that far ahead here. Well, another question that I would have and it would kind of follow up about how it's received. Maybe someone can talk about the common thoughts or interpretations expressed about this technology and its applications, maybe even from a regulatory standpoint of view and then an end user view. I think we'd have to have more specifics on that.
Dick, are you able to respond to some of this? You know, my sense is that there is so much that is still undecided. For example, the rules and regulations that are specific to sense and avoid that type of stuff is still very much a work in progress as far as developing specifications and then following that with the usual rulemaking process. So my guess at this point is that we don't really know what's going to be the end result of all the work that's going on, but we could say that the vision is built around at least the concept of next gen and then how an integrated airspace could function.
One thing that we haven't really discussed in great detail is that the system that was developed for the Navy included the potential for an automatic or an autonomous signal input to an autopilot on an unmanned aircraft. And what that does is reduce the risk or should at least reduce the concern if it's functional and effective. That means that an unmanned aircraft that either loses link with its
controlling pilot on the ground or for some other reason fails to respond to guidance that is provided by the system, it would key in a maneuver into the autopilot directly causing the unmanned aircraft to avoid hitting any manned aircraft or in fact any other unmanned aircraft.
So the rules and regulations that will be relevant to that particular type of function are still very much a work in progress, but I think the approach that has been taken, at least our approach so far, has been that if we can make this happen and we can prove that it does happen then the specifications and regulations could be built around something that you actually have data, evidence that shows that it does exist and it can occur. That's a very good point that we did not share with the callers is the fact that we have also utilized the capability of all known data information.
We preload the databases that are pertinent, whether it's the military databases or the FAA safe database or known towers or known borders or no fly zones, those things are put into the OSAS capability and they are processed on board with the rest of the sensor input picture. And more importantly that data is also captured, collected, analyzed and then shared. We are doing this under military funding presently and that is being shared. We recently had inquiries from other services as well as other agencies to identify what the MOPS could be with this type of capability.
Again, we've designed our system with multi-layers, algorithms, dual band radio and the ability to have an FPGA design has allowed us to tweak as we go. Then that design will allow us to harden the design and certify it and more importantly take it to the smaller miniaturized capability of ASIC components. So we're very excited. We feel it's very robust.
I use the analogy frequently of it's another app for your iPhone. The iPhone has all this capability. It captures all the available data that's out there. You just write additional applications to process the information.
And again, it's very open ended. The more we learn, the more questions we ask and the more questions we ask, the more we advance. So we're actually pretty excited about having this opportunity to share the information. The promises is great and anything that makes the NAS safer is something that we're definitely interested in.
Now the other thing and this is just something I want to throw out because I talk about this but I had this discussion with my father about privacy and some issues with people talking about drones and privacy. I'm just throwing this out here and it might be a little off the cuff but do you think it is possible to have an app for cell phones for people who are concerned about privacy that they might be able to have an app on either Android or iPhone where they would be able to kind of monitor where these drone aircraft were?
Kind of there was swage privacy concerns. Anybody want to field that?
That's actually kind of interesting because almost by definition with the ADSB infrastructure you would have that ability to look at the location of all aircraft if in fact they required ADSB for UAS unmanned aerial vehicles. That would be a very good reason actually for requiring ADSB capabilities to be on all unmanned aerial vehicles as well as manned aircraft because then you would in fact know where all the drones were assuming that you knew the identification of the type of aircraft associated with each of the ADSB messages.
That is built into the ADSB message structure, the type of aircraft that is transmitting the signal. So it would be fairly simple to decode which ones were drones and which ones were not. That would actually could be a solution that may assuage some of the, let's say, apprehension that people have about this technology. I mean I'm sure we'd have to kind of work out if let's say first responders or police were doing police work there may have to be a delay or something depending upon their operations.
But that would be one way for us to work with the privacy people to feel better about this technology. There's a, I don't know if it's a million dollar idea, but it's definitely one that has some merit. Before we run out of time, this was very fascinating and I'm very happy that you guys were able to come on and talk about this technology and the promise. Some of it may be a little in depth and involved for some folks.
So is there a website where people could go and say learn more information? Do you guys have a website that you'd like to mention?
We do have a website, R-Cubed Engineering. We also work closely with UAV MarketSpace and they have a website at SUAS. That's your, Patrick is yours. So what we'll do is we have plans and works to do future webinars and we'll get that information out.
You can get that to us as a press release when you're ready to do that and we'll post that at the SUASnews.com website. Because I think it would be, what is the old saying, is the picture worth a thousand words?
And folks could probably go there and learn a little bit more about what you guys are talking about. Again, fascinating. The promise, I'm really excited about the promise and the safety. I'd like to thank everyone for coming on and taking the time today to be part of our guests.
And I would encourage the listeners to get more educated about this technology. If you got any questions, you could also email me, Patrick at SUASnews.com and I could always forward that on. Again, thanks so much for coming on. Everybody have a good week.
Thank you. Bye bye.