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"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.
(Score: 2) by gidds on Wednesday August 12 2015, @01:12PM
(This is probably a heretical view, but I like playing Devil's Advocate :-)
The air is already fairly crowded: there are light aircraft, gliders, remote-controlled aircraft, kites, balloons, birds, bats, insects, the odd plastic bag...
And there's already a navigation system that works for them all: it's called Visual Flight Rules [wikipedia.org], and it's simple enough that both flies and flying-boats can do it.
Any new devices that take to the air will need to cope with all those things. And while some aircraft might be regulatorially (if I can coin such a word) forced to implement new systems, you won't persuade birds, bees, or butterflies to do the same.
So isn't it simpler and safer all round to expect new devices to follow the existing rules???
After all, that's what we're doing with autonomous vehicles on land: Google cars etc. have had huge development efforts to interact with human drivers and other obstacles by following the existing rules of the road. Why should the air be any different?
[sig redacted]