NOT JUST FLIGHT OF FANCY
Vigilant-OSU research drone completes 18-mile flight by itself
Vigilant Aerospace Systems recently flew an autonomous drone 18 miles during a software test, which demonstrated its aircraft management system called FlightHorizon 2.
Federal aviation rules now require unmanned aircraft to stay within visual line of sight at all times. Vigilant and its partners at Oklahoma State University have a waiver to operate beyond that range inside a 13-mile flight corridor east of Stillwater.
The test provided a proof of concept for Vi gil ant' s unmanned traffic management capabilities. Its drone was f ully autonomous; t he drone took off, flew an 18-mile route inside the corridor and landed on its own.
A pilot remained ready at the controls while an observer followed the drone, but the drone did all the work. The demonstration showed how drones could one day pilot themselves through dedicated airspace, all while avoiding other drones and manned aircraft.
"In the future, you can demonstrate that you've done this type of flight autonomously, and then with software like
ours, on the ground and then eventually on board, you can begin to move away from having someone watching the aircraft at all ,” Vigilant CEO Kraettli L. Epperson said.
The next step is to add data from both groundbased and aircraft-based radars, Epperson said.
“We were very fortunate that we have this partnership with OSU, and we' re going to be doing that work over the next year,” he said. “So we're a couple months into this project, and we expect for the next three or four months we will be doing pretty extensive radar-based research and development of the product.”
Vigilant already has customers using its firstgeneration FlightHorizon software. As dr one airspace becomes more autonomous, the drone industry will mature and grow, Epperson said. This test flight and others are critical milestones in the industry's development, he added.
“The unmanned aircraft industry's top needs continue to be autonomous safety systems, on-board detect-andavoid solutions and better unmanned traffic management,” Epperson said. “This flight allowed
us to make progress on all three by demonstrating our system's capabilities over a much longer duration and greater distances while providing active alerting and air space visualization to the pilot and observers.”
The flight tests and development of Flight Horizon 2 involves a partnership with Oklahoma State University's Unmanned Systems Research Institute, which is led by Director Jamey Jacob, a professor at the university.
“This flight and the team of OSU research engineers and students and Vigilant Aerospace staff who conducted it represent a forwardlooking approach to utilizing public-private partnerships to rapidly advance the technology and bring innovations to market,” Jacob said.