SBIR-STTR Award

In this Phase I Project ACTA and its partners will demonstrate the feasibility of developing a risk-based mission path planning (RB MPP) approach. Areas of interest to the Navy where a RB MPP address critical needs include enabling less restrictive UAS operations within the US National and Foreign Airspaces. The Phase I will demonstrate feasibility with a two-step approach. The first step will demonstrate the capability to compute quantitative mission-ready risk assessments (for personnel and property on the ground) for individual UAS paths, and to parameterize ensembles of these paths over plausible candidate routes which match geographic constraints. The second step will be to demonstrate multi-criteria optimization over the ensembles of candidate paths, in order to identify mission paths which minimize the objective function. Methods will be developed to visualize the trade space and priorities of this two-step optimization problem. Requirements for a comprehensive risk database will also be identified and an open architecture and interface specification will be developed.

Benefit:
The direct benefits will include the ability to seek fewer operational restrictions on the Navys UAS fleet by providing Air Vehicle Operators with quantitative risk assessment methods and optimization tools that will ensure consistent levels of safety and a more structured mission planning process across all classes of UASs on both sea and land. Beyond addressing safety, the savings in mission planning time and the ability to optimize mission resources (manpower, time and fuel, for example) are expected to lead to significant cost savings. The increased number of missions will augment the effectiveness of UASs in the Nations global defense posture. The modular and open approach will benefit other researchers.

Keywords:
UAS, UAS, reduced-order models, population and building risk, risk-based mission planning, risk assessment, analysis of alternatives