An investigation of UAS situational awareness in off-nominal events

UAS pilots today have limited situational awareness in some scenarios such that they may be unable to sense incipient problems and to formulate effective responses in a timely manner. As UAS operations evolve to increasingly higher levels of autonomy, these challenges will only become increasingly acute. Therefore we are identifying unmanned aircraft systems situational awareness issues and intervention procedures for off-nominal events. This paper reports on our preliminary results. This research consists of four main phases: a survey of incident reports and previous studies, the development of unmanned aircraft systems off-nominal concepts of operations, the formulation of an architecture that supports enhanced unmanned aircraft systems situational awareness and responsiveness, and a failure and hazard analysis. This study will develop a research roadmap for autonomous unmanned aircraft systems, and will guide the development of future autonomous system behaviors for detection, option development and decision making related to offnominal events.