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Unmanned aircraft systems in the national airspace system: a formal methods perspective

Published: 08 August 2016 Publication History

Abstract

As the technological and operational capabilities of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) have grown, so too have international efforts to integrate UAS into civil airspace. However, one of the major concerns that must be addressed in realizing this integration is that of safety. For example, UAS lack an on-board pilot to comply with the legal requirement that pilots see and avoid other aircraft. This requirement has motivated the development of a detect and avoid (DAA) capability for UAS that provides situational awareness and maneuver guidance to UAS operators to aid them in avoiding and remaining well clear of other aircraft in the airspace. The NASA Langley Research Center Formal Methods group has played a fundamental role in the development of this capability. This article gives a selected survey of the formal methods work conducted in support of the development of a DAA concept for UAS. This work includes specification of low-level and high-level functional requirements, formal verification of algorithms, and rigorous validation of software implementations.

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Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGLOG News
ACM SIGLOG News  Volume 3, Issue 3
July 2016
94 pages
EISSN:2372-3491
DOI:10.1145/2984450
Issue’s Table of Contents

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 08 August 2016
Published in SIGLOG Volume 3, Issue 3

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  • (2023)Example Applications of Formal Methods to Aerospace and Autonomous Systems2023 IEEE International Conference on Assured Autonomy (ICAA)10.1109/ICAA58325.2023.00018(67-75)Online publication date: Jun-2023
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