ARCAA conducted a wide range of aerospace automation research, with a particular focus on researching autonomous technologies which supported the more efficient and safer utilisation of airspace. ARCAA’s research and development of autonomous aircraft and on-board sensor systems was successfully integrated into both manned and unmanned commercial applications.
ARCAA’s research was primarily focused on the following themes:
1. Remote Sensing
The remote sensing theme addressed the challenges in design, autonomy, sensor integration, and path planning and data classification when using UAS in remote sensing tasks. This included precision agriculture and plant biosecurity, air quality and air pollution science as well as environmental ecological assessments such as mammal classification and counting in both open and cluttered environments.
2. Cooperative Systems
The cooperative systems theme addressed the issue of using numerous UAVs to work together to achieve common tasks with reduced human operator workload. Numerous unmanned aircraft working together can accomplish tasks more efficiently and effectively than a solo UA working independently. A key question ARCAA researched was how to cost-effectively and safely operate multiple UAVs to enable societal and commercial benefits for applications such as agriculture, fire monitoring, search and rescue and surveillance within aviation standards and regulations.
3. Enabling Technologies
The enabling technologies theme focused on allowing an unmanned aircraft to perform civilian tasks routinely with minimal user supervision. These technologies aim at driving a radical change in the way unmanned aircraft are used in society by increasing autonomy, enhancing situational awareness, creating resilient algorithms to changes in lighting conditions and solving complex navigation tasks without prior knowledge about the environment or unaffected by unmodelled or sudden changes in it.
4. Airspace Integration
The airspace integration theme examined the key challenges facing the routine operation of unmanned aircraft within Australian airspace. Previous research identified that existing UA airspace integration work was being conducted elsewhere in the world and pin-pointed operational concepts specific to the operation of UA in Australia’s distinctive environment. With UA becoming more prevalent in civil airspace on a routine basis, further research was required to ensure that Australia’s air traffic management systems were ready to cater for them.
5. Robust Autonomy
The robust autonomy theme focused upon quantification of how the unmanned aircraft system was able to continue operations in the presence of faults, or how it then shuts down safely. It has particular application given the push toward greater onboard autonomy of UA with an end state of beyond visual line of sight or swarm operations.