PrecisionHawk has been awarded two patents for technologies it has developed for unmanned aircraft system traffic management (UTM). The patents, titled ‘Automated Unmanned Air Traffic Control System,’ are designed to enable collision avoidance between drones and manned aircraft. This is achieved by transmitting real-time flight data from drones to a UTM server prior to and while in-flight.
“It’s clear that the more you know about the real-time environment you’re operating in, the more safely and efficiently you can operate,” said Allison Ferguson, PrecisionHawk director, Airspace Research. ”The more important question is how does a drone operator reliably get that situational awareness? What information is needed and when? LATAS was a key enabling technology for the Pathfinder efforts, which were aimed at determining answers to precisely those questions.”
