Aeronautics: NASA Government Invention of the Year Award for UTM Technology
June 2020
Ames Research Center was selected by the NASA General Counsel as the Winner of the 2020 NASA Government Invention of the Year award for the "Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM) to Enable Civilian Low Altitude Goods and Service Delivery by UAS" technology. This winning traffic management system allows UAS to maintain safe and efficient operations for goods and services delivery. UTM is essential to enable accelerated applications of UAS. UTM will accommodate and support all types of UAS operations ranging from disposable drones with minimalistic avionics capabilities to highly capable UAS.
This Agency-wide recognition was awarded to Dr. Parimal Kopardekar from NASA and the Ames UAS/UTM team that made UTM a reality. Charlene Cayabyab (USRA), Punam Verma (USRA), and Tung Nguyen (Crown) from NAMS were part of the UTM team. They supported software development on multiple UTM components, systems integration and validation, project scheduling, and Technical Capability Level field demonstrations. The UTM team previously won the 2019 NASA Software of the Year Award in July 2019 and an Ames Technology Transfer Award in February 2020
The invention transforms traditional, human-centric air traffic management into a modern, machine-centric, federated approach. In traditional Air Traffic Management, there is a centralized authority that provides services to operations to keep the airspace safe and accessible. However, in UTM, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) delegates some of that authority to other entities to provide similar services to directly support operators. In addition, those operators may receive services from different service suppliers. These additional services may include low-altitude weather, congestion management, terrain avoidance, route planning, rerouting, separation management, and contingency management, to name a few. This novel ecosystem requires a federation of services that are interconnected and communicating via well-defined interfaces and protocols.
