Breakthrough technologies being developed at a new aerospace research centre will provide considerably enhanced safety for light aircraft.
Breakthrough collision avoidance, emergency landing and separation management technologies being developed at a new joint Queensland University of Technology and CSIRO aerospace research centre will provide considerably enhanced safety for light aircraft.
The technologies could also allow unmanned aircraft to perform beneficial operations such as search and rescue, bush fire fighting and monitoring ash clouds from volcanoes as well as power line inspection and crop monitoring.
The Australian Research Centre for Aerospace Automation (ARCAA) in the Da Vinci Precinct at Brisbane Airport houses more than 35 aviation research scientists and support staff.
ARCAA researcher and QUT lecturer Dr Luis Mejias said the ARCAA facility provided researchers with the tools for leading edge research.
"We are focussing on aviation technologies which will save lives and improve the efficiency of the aviation industry," Dr Mejias said. "For example, mid-air collisions between light planes over Australia have caused the death of eight people in the past five years. ARCAA is developing a Dynamic Sense-and-Act (DSA) system which could provide a cost-effective early warning solution to this problem.
"The DSA system is a safety breakthrough for small planes because until now they have had to primarily rely on the pilot's vigilance to "see-and-avoid" other planes. This can be a difficult task particularly during take-off and landing when there are can be a number of planes operating in a close area and when the pilot has a high workload.
"Recent flight testing has shown that these early warnings can be provided up to four times sooner than the minimum warning time required by a human pilot and, with some recently made refinements, we expect the warning time to be even longer."
The DSA uses an onboard camera, graphics processing hardware and sophisticated image processing algorithms to detect mid-air collisions.
Dr Mejias said that while large commercial aircraft had collision avoidance systems, they had limitations and there was currently no cost-effective and self-contained collision avoidance system suitable for use on light aircraft.
"The new ARCAA- developed system could not only improve the safety of conventionally piloted aircraft operations but also provide unmanned aircraft with the collision avoidance capability necessary for them to fly in civilian airspace," he said.
Dr Mejias said the DSA system had been undergoing flight testing at Kingaroy using a specially modified aircraft.
Recent trials included full autonomous "closed-loop" scenarios where the DSA system detected and manoeuvred the test aircraft without pilot input.
"We believe the autonomous closed-loop testing of the vision-based system to be the first successful civilian trials of its kind in the world," Dr Mejias said.
QUT researcher and ARCAA acting director Professor Duncan Campbell (right) and Queensland Treasurer Andrew Fraser in a Cessna at the launch of ARCAA. (QUT Erika Fish)
