RELATED APPLICATIONS

This application is a national phase of PCT/IB2018/052984, filed on Apr. 30, 2018, which claims the benefit of International Application No. PCT/IB2017/052638, filed on May 5, 2017. The entire contents of these applications are hereby incorporated by reference.

REFERENCE DATA

This application claims priority of International Patent Application PCT/IB2017/052638 filed on May 5, 2017.

TECHNICAL FIELD

The invention disclosed herein relates to UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), general aviation aircraft and commercial aircraft. The invention acts as a scaled down aviation air-traffic control system, which provides to the drone pilot or autopilot local information to avoid collisions with air vehicles, especially in the area where the drone is flying and at low altitudes.

BACKGROUND

The present invention relates to radar systems, specifically to ones used to detect, track and monitor air vehicles having cooperative detection systems installed, such as automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) or transponder.

A drone or unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is an air vehicle without a pilot on board. Nowadays, drones come in any size (starting with a few grams weight up to several hundreds of kilos) and their application keep multiplying.

As the drone number increases, the danger of them colliding with manned air traffic grows. In order to avoid accidents, more and more collision avoidance solutions have been proposed in prior art. Those solutions can be categorized as follows:

radars to detect UAVs;

sensors installed on UAVs, to detect other air-traffic;

sensors installed on air-traffic, to detect UAVs.

Accordingly, to avoid a collision, the position of an UAV which is too close to a manned air vehicle is communicated to the ATC (air traffic control) or directly to the pilot in various ways. After that, it is to the pilot to take measures to avoid the collision. Drone number is predicted to considerably grow in the following year. This approach would result in a surcharge of work for the ATC and for the pilot in order to handle the interactions with more and more UAVs.

On the other side, sensors installed on UAVs are very limited in range because of low power allocated to the emitter (this is true especially for drones under 10 kg), resulting in a non-prompt communication with a potentially colliding aircraft. Furthermore, such kind of device drains the autonomy of the drone itself, lowering its flight autonomy.

All of the above technical problems suggest that collision avoidance between UAVs and manned air vehicles should be handled in a way where the traffic information is given directly to the drone (and therefore using its intelligence for the collision avoidance) instead of the manned vehicle, while not adding another technical device to the drone itself.

SUMMARY

The system described herein addresses the collision avoidance issue between UAVs and manned air traffic, by providing to the drone pilot or autopilot the air traffic status around the drone. In this way, the drone (and not the manned aircraft) can act automatically and avoid the traffic before the collision. The first advantage of this approach is that the full potential of the drone autopilot is used, as the system does not rely on conventional ATC or on the manned pilot, consequently not surcharging those groups of professionals.

In order to obtain a good air situation awareness around the area where the drone is flying, without adding hardware on the drone, a hardware to detect the traffic is installed on the ground, close to the drone operator. The hardware consists of a portable control tower capable of detecting air traffic equipped with ADS-B (a new standard to communicate air traffic position) and/or a transponder (an older standard for the same purposes). Detecting air-traffic equipped exclusively with a transponder is a real advantage because this kind of traffic flies in the same areas used by drones, at the same low altitudes.

The positions read with the portable control tower are transformed in GPS coordinates, then the direction, speed and altitude of the air vehicles are computed by a software acting as an automatic air-traffic controller. All such information is provided either to the drone pilot (which will act manually to avoid the collision) or to the drone autopilot (which will be able to avoid the collision automatically).

The present disclosure concerns a portable air-traffic control system comprising:

a plurality of portable mini control towers (each composed by an ADS-B receiver, a miniaturized version of an aviation SSR (secondary surveillance radar), a pressure sensor, a GPS antenna, a magnetometer, a battery and a computer where all those devices are connected), to detect air vehicles equipped with ADS-B or transponder;

a specific software, to be incorporated in a computer or a tablet, acting as an automatic air-traffic controller, allowing the display of the GPS positions of the air vehicles detected by the portable control tower, and allowing the eventual collision avoidance;

a connection to an external drone system, Such connection allows the direct reading of the air traffic situation by the drone autopilot or the drone pilot.

In an embodiment, the system portability is limited and the battery is replaced by a fixed connection to the power network, called fixed mini control tower.

In an embodiment, the multiple fixed mini control towers are inter-connected to the same air-traffic controller, to extend the coverage range of the whole system.

The present disclosure also concerns a procedure to transform the reading of a miniaturized aviation SSR to GPS coordinates.

