Defense wants ideas on how unmanned aircraft can take to U.S. skies safely

The Office of the Secretary of Defense wants to engage the aerospace engineering community in conversations on how to integrate unmanned aircraft in U.S. skies safely, government databases show.

It is inviting engineers and researchers to present ideas for building a “sense-and-avoid” system that would prevent collisions between drones and other aircraft, according to a solicitation.

The Federal Aviation Administration this year cleared drone aircraft for widespread use in domestic airspace, triggering concerns that they would pose an aviation hazard to military and commercial pilots.

Defense has established a panel of scientists to engage the wider research and engineering community to address the security issues. The panel is requesting informational briefs on how to implement technology, operations procedures and algorithms to build a system that would to help drones avoid crashing into other planes. “OSD recognizes that a key challenge to integrating [unmanned aircraft systems] into the National Airspace System is a means for UAS to sense and avoid other aircraft,” the solicitation reads.

The panel is also interested in metrics to measure the effectiveness of complex sensor systems and the risk of software glitches in computer programs used to command the unmanned planes.

The selected presentations will be made in November at research organization MITRE in McLean, Va. Responses are due August 31. To facilitate conversations, Defense has requested that submissions be unclassified.