SBIR-STTR Award

Vertical Take-off and Landing (VTOL), Advanced Air Mobility (AAM), and Agility Prime operations will require advanced autonomy and perception capabilities to ensure reduced operator workload and operating costs, and enable future unmanned operations. In fact, in many instances, the move towards unmanned operations is key to the business case for longer term eVTOL commercial operations. Before these Unmanned Air Systems (UAS) are able to carry out missions in civilian environments they will need to demonstrate safe and reliable take-off, navigation, collision avoidance, and landing capabilities. Over the past few years, Scientific Systems Company, Inc. (SSCI) has been developing a system to address very similar challenges for the Navy’s MQ-8 Fire Scout VTOL UAS. Over the course of this STTR effort, SSCI will partner with Brigham Young University (BYU), to build on existing autonomy and perception capabilities to develop OASES (Open Autonomy/Safety Enhancement System), an integrated safety package that can be customized and installed on any DoD or commercial UAS to support safe and reliable autonomous missions. During the STTR Phase I period, SSCI and BYU will build on existing capabilities for collision threat detection and obstacle avoidance to design a multi-faceted OASES sense-and-avoid strategy for the disparate flight conditions that are expected to be encountered in AAM operations due to the versatility of modern (e)VTOL aircraft. In the Phase II effort, the team will adapt SSCI’s existing INAV-SL ship-board recovery technology to develop the OASES precision landing component. SSCI and BYU expect to partner with commercial UAS vendors to perform a preliminary demonstration of the OASES collision avoidance and landing capabilities in Phase II. In Phase III, SSCI and BYU will work with commercial UAS/eVTOL vendors to develop versions of the OASES integrated safety package that can be integrated with their platforms. SSCI anticipates adding GPS-denied navigation capabilities, based on SSCI’s ImageNav technology, to the OASES integrated safety package in Phase III.

The potential benefit of unmanned air systems (UAS) will only fully be realized when implemented alongside autonomy and perception capabilities that support safe and reliable operations. The Open Autonomy/Safety Enhancement System (OASES) is a commercial product that is currently being developed by Scientific Systems Company, Inc. (SSCI) which address the fundamental safety challenges associated with autonomous operation of military and commercial UAS. The OASES portfolio, currently being developed for Navy unmanned platforms, includes core technologies for autonomous sense-and-avoid (SAA), non-GPS landing operations, and non-GPS precision navigation. In this effort, SSCI will focus on further developing the collision avoidance capability to enable autonomous UAS operation in Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) applications, where the UAS must fly Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) of human operators or monitors. The proposed Phase II program seeks to develop modular sensor components for SAFESEE which enable greater flexibility for system integration. Specifically, by developing configurable SAFESEE sensor modules, this effort will provide a broadly-applicable SAA solution that can be easily adapted to suit a wide variety of both military and commercial UAS platforms.