Description: In this SBIR project, Daniel H. Wagner Associates, Inc., will design and demonstrate the feasibility of a system for integrating environmental data into flight planning and execution for Unmanned Air Systems (UAS) in the National Airspace System (NAS). The Weather Aware Route Planning (WARP) system will provide weather-based Indicators and Warnings (I&W) and navigational recommendations for UAS in order to improve their autonomy, safety, and energy efficiency. Using all available environmental and navigational data, WARP will assess environmental impacts to planned/executing flight plans and generate alerts and recommendations for those plans based on expected environmental impacts. Operating within a ground-based control center, WARP will incorporate position and environmental data from existing and emerging Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) sources. Using a combination of rules-based/heuristic and computationally-intensive approaches, WARP will assess environmental impacts to individual UAS flight plans and provide I&W and recommendations for each UAS to avoid negative environmental impacts and take advantage of positive environmental impacts. WARP will assist ground-based pilots, and eventually UAS autonomous controllers, in performing safer and more efficient flight.

Benefits: NASA is a key partner in the development and maturation of NextGen technologies. Specifically, the Integrated Systems Research Program (ISRP) matures and integrates NextGen technologies into major vehicle/operational systems (http://www.aeronautics.nasa.gov/programs_isrp.htm), and the UAS Integration in the NAS Project (http://www.aeronautics.nasa.gov/isrp/uas/index.htm) within ISRP is focusing on demonstrating effective UAS operations in relevant test environments. In Phase I, we will begin discussions with this NASA program in order to pursue potential Phase II-E and/or Phase II-X partnerships to help develop UAS and Command and Control (C2) performance standards regarding environmental conditions and to integrate WARP (upon successful prototype development in Phase II) into a realistic test environment, such as their planned live virtual constructive (LVC) distributed environment (DE).

Commercial (Phase III) customers for WARP outside of NASA include a host of government agencies (e.g., FAA, DHS, DoD, DoT, etc.) and prime contractors (e.g., ITT, Raytheon, Leidos, etc.) working on UAS and their associated C2 systems, within the NAS and operating anywhere in the world. Specifically within DoD, we are very familiar with Raytheon and Leidos, since we are working with them on a DARPA project for distributed data fusion among UAS. We have recently secured Phase III funding for our Multi-Sensor Data Fusion System (MSDFS), which transitioned search effectiveness optimization and evaluation modules into three Navy programs of record (PoRs). We have also licensed data fusion systems for unmanned vehicles and border security, and search optimization systems for mine warfare and underwater search, and transitioned several route and area search optimization and evaluation systems into Navy PoRs.