British engineers are testing an unmanned plane that could pave the way for an airspace revolution. Metro went on board to have a look at the technology.
The way we perceive the impact of any new application of technology is skewed by perspective, but with the benefit of hindsight, technological epiphanies are blindingly obvious.
So when the sight of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) ferrying precious lifesaving organs autonomously from hospital to hospital is as much an everyday sight as our earthbound ambulance, chroniclers of the next century will look back and say history was made 5,000 feet over a small square of the Irish Sea.
Moving organs from medical facilities is just one possible future use for autonomous UAVs.
Currently, Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) regulations that cover British airspace mean large UAVs can only operate in segregated restricted airspace, whist small UAVs (under 20kg) may fly no more than 500m from the operator.
In order to open the airways to a predicted UAV gold rush, these rules need to be rewritten to allow both manned and unmanned craft to share the same airspace.
As a result, Astraea (Antonymous Systems Technology Related Airborne Evaluation And Assessment), a British industry-led consortium of seven major companies, was born.
Its goal is to set the appropriate certification in place that would allow unmanned flight to bloom.
‘Astraea was founded on the basis that until we have sorted out the opening up of the airspace, commercial exploitation is not possible – therefore it’s a little bit of a chicken and egg situation,’ said Lambert Dopping-Hepenstal, the group’s programme director and engineering director at BAE Systems, which has provided the test aircraft for unmanned flight.
As part of the £62m research project, Astraea is operating a relatively unsophisticated airliner modified as a flying ‘test bed’, examining a set of radical systems that may ultimately have as much impact on the future of aviation as the first manned powered flight by the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk in 1903.
The aircraft, a BAE Systems Jetstream 31, has been configured using existing technology as a ‘surrogate UAV’ and replicates an autonomous UAV, operating in a box of controlled airspace over the Irish Sea.
It has been flying missions without any input from the on-board pilots, who have handed control over to the racks of computers and control system in the rear of the aircraft.
It’s a collection of systems that have been assembled from existing off-the-shelf hardware, including radio frequency identification transponders, infrared detectors and a modified digital camera.
However by using some very clever algorithms, the computer on board can fly the aircraft and make crucial decisions, all without any help from the pilots.
Getting the aircraft to react as it would if flown by a human pilot is key to achieving the all-important certification.
‘It’s all about everything being equivalent to a manned aircraft equivalent safety and behaving in an equivalent way,’ said Mr Dopping-Hepenstal. ‘The mantra we use is that it is safe to fly and it is flown safely.
‘This isn’t science fiction – this is pulling together a whole load of technologies in an integrated way.
‘Clearly there will more equipment on this aircraft than a manned aircraft because we’re having to do some things the person on the aircraft was responsible for, but it’s not absurdly more. We’re not going to have an aircraft many times the size of the current one to be able to do this.’
One of the three key tasks the innovative system tackles autonomously is ‘weather avoidance’, where it recognises cloud types that are potentially hazardous and their distance using its electronic eye, a modified digital camera.
The on-board computer then plots a course which avoids those clouds and the system’s range accuracy is at least as good as a pilot can manage.
Among the concepts being trialled are ‘sense and avoid’ technology in which the plane’s antenna will pick up other aircraft by tracking their transponder signals.
According to Mr Dopping-Hepenstal, the system must be able to say to itself, ‘This field that looks like a field, is it really a field or has someone just organised a car boot sale in there?’
The landing system was successfully tested at a small airfield in Cumbria. As safety on the ground is paramount, future systems will continually plot fall-back landing sites to which it could divert and should it decide those sites are not viable it will find a safe place to sacrifice the aircraft and ditch.
This is all leading up to the historic milestone later this year when the aircraft will make the maiden flight of a surrogate UAV in British shared airspace.
The aircraft will fly to a set of CAA regulations called the Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) under instruction of air traffic control.
What happens after a successful test is anyone’s guess, but Mr Dopping-Hepenstal said: ‘I see it as opening up a whole new branch of aviation limited only by one’s imagination.’