THE PROBLEM: Uncrewed aircraft have become ubiquitous over the past two decades. The capabilities of these aircraft have skyrocketed, making them able to perform missions that were unimaginable years ago. The Federal Aviation Administration has been working with standards development organizations such as RTCA (formerly the Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics) and ASTM International (formerly the American Society for Testing and Materials) to draft rules for integrating these aircraft into the National Airspace System. One inherent challenge for remotely piloted aircraft is the federal mandate that a pilot must “see and avoid” and “remain well-clear” of other aircraft to avoid collisions. In response, RTCA published “DO-365 - Minimum Operational Performance Standards (MOPS) for Detect and Avoid (DAA) Systems.” This document defines “well-clear” and outlines standards for a DAA system. To demonstrate such a system, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was requested to develop a reference implementation of DAA algorithms. 

THE SOLUTION: The technology developed, Detect-and-AvoID Alerting Logic for Unmanned Systems (DAIDALUS), provides core algorithms for a DAA system, including detection, alerts, and maneuver guidance. DAIDALUS also has capabilities that account for measurement errors and improve sensor accuracy. 

THE TECH TRANSFER MECHANISM: DAIDALUS was first developed during the RTCA-led development of the DO-365 standards document as a guide for implementing DAA systems. The technology’s initial user base consisted of participants in the development of the standards document, including users who were doing experiments to determine the timing of alerts, how guidance should be displayed, and many other aspects. DAIDALUS was even used in the final safety analysis of the original version of DO-365. Because the whole aviation community needs to follow the same standards, the developers of DAIDALUS and NASA’s technology transfer office opted to release DAIDALUS under a NASA Open Source Agreement. The software is hosted on Github.com, making it easily accessible to the aviation industry and researchers. 

THE TECH TRANSFER EXCELLENCE: The technology transfer story was made possible by embracing the NASA open-source model. This software license allows NASA’s partners to achieve amazing research, demonstration, and operationalization goals without the added burden of creating interagency agreements, determining licensing issues, or requiring the respective legal offices to get heavily involved. For a research organization, the NASA open-source license is a technology transfer tool that arguably allows for the widest transfer possible: The users in a recipient organization can immediately and directly experiment and use DAIDALUS, and they can ask technical questions to the development team who, in turn, use the feedback to improve the documentation and the code. 

THE OUTCOMES: DAIDALUS provides significant advantages that have led to its wide use: flexible configuration, assured behavior, and open-source availability. The project aimed to identify ways to reduce technical barriers, which was achieved through the first transfer of DAIDALUS. The transfer allowed partner entities to research and experiment much faster than if they had to develop detect-and-avoid capabilities in-house. So far, Mosaic has integrated DAIDALUS with a system that uses Remote ID — a drone’s ability to broadcast in-flight identification and location information — to prevent collisions between drones. UPS and Raytheon have integrated a version of DAIDALUS in their UPS Flight Forward system that uses drones to deliver packages. The Naval Air Systems Command has integrated the technology into its ground-based detect-and-avoid system and approved its use within military airspace.