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Freeman writes:

"If you're wondering, the initiative aims to establish a feasible system that can manage the flow of traffic for unmanned aerial vehicles, helicopters, planes and gliders that fly 500 feet and below."

According to Richard Kelley, the group's lead scientist, they (everyone involved in the project, that is) "need to devise a system to make vehicles autonomously aware of each other so they can avoid each other, as well as a system to create traffic 'patterns' or navigation protocols that would keep aircraft away from each other in the first place." Kelley will load his software on a drone in the coming months and will begin conducting test flights while connected to a NASA server and under the space agency's supervision. That means he's not only testing his software, but NASA's traffic system itself.

Automated Air Traffic Flow would be a prerequisite for autonomous flying cars. Maybe I'll get to see some flying cars, before I die.

We provided earlier coverage of this in NASA and Air Traffic Control for Drones; there is also a story we ran about a similar effort by google: Google Wants Order in Uncontrolled Airspace So its Wing Drones Can Fly.

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