SBIR/STTR Award attributes
To realize humanitarian, civil defense, and other missions where ORBs are necessary, the Air Force must incorporate all constraints into current operations / command and control (C2) and future mission planning, including terrain, obstacles, air traffic, weather, battery / fuel drain rates, contingencies, emergency procedures, communication alternatives, and so forth. To help plan missions, Mosaic ATM and its industry partner, the University of Central Florida, propose modifying an existing National Airspace System (NAS) flight plan evaluation tool to the needs of the Air Force. When complete, the proposed ORB Common Reference (OCR) Software as a Service (SaaS) will provide mission planning services to include route optimization, contingency management, and divert options. The project is low technical risk as it builds upon the existing NAS Common Reference (NCR) service that Mosaic has already produced for the FAA. The NCR software service operates within the FAA’s System Wide Information Management (SWIM) layered architecture, and consumes NAS status and constraint data from various SWIM Information Services, geo-references the information, and stores the data in a common reference system. NCR exposes a service API for identifying constraints along a route of flight that can be used by FAA systems and NAS users. It is this service API that will be exploited by the OCR to provide current operations and future mission planning services. In addition, new databases—such as the Digital Terrain Elevation Database (DTED) and 3D modeling of cities found in Open Street Maps (OSM) data —will be added to NCR to provide the necessary detail of the urban environment. Operating ORB missions in an urban / suburban environment presents different challenges and constraints than operating at higher altitudes. First, ORBs are lighter than existing commercial aircraft, meaning that winds are a significant factor—even winds as low as 20-30 knots. Secondly, because ORBs are operating close to the ground, their reaction time to problems is limited and the dynamically changing terrain on the ground in an urban region is also a challenge. Thirdly, landing sites may be difficult to identify if the primary ones are disabled for some reason. The project has low technical risk because the NCR service and all its derivatives were developed by Mosaic ATM. The OCR will be a derivative of NCR. The team will identify urban/suburban low altitude constraints (3,000 feet AGL and below), find a source of live data for these constraints, and then load the data into the service and change the NCR algorithms slightly to conform to the new constraints. Low altitude terrain and obstacle constraints will be extracted from NGA-supplied DTED. Other constraints can be identified and quantified by our university partner, the University of Central Florida.
