A Simulated Environment for Testing 4D Detect See and Avoid Scenarios for UAVs

Abstract

A synthetic environment has been developed which permits the realistic simulation of encounter scenarios of two small aircraft. This may be used to develop and test Detect Sense and Avoid (DSA) strategies for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). A novel maneuver has been invented that simplifies the generation of air-to-air encounters. This “Phi Maneuver” guarantees a variety of encounter geometries, and at least one encounter for each pass of the Intruder aircraft through the loiter zone of the Target aircraft. This provides an effect way to test multiple DSA scenarios and generate statistics on the relative merits of a particular DSA method.