The FAA has named a team consisting of ANRA Technologies, Switch and the Nevada Institute for Autonomous Systems (NIAS) as the recipient of a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) contract for the demonstration and validation of UAS Traffic Management (UTM) technologies.
ANRA and Switch will conduct demonstrations and validation of new unmanned systems at the NIAS test site to evaluate performance thresholds, mitigation strategies, operational constraints, and system requirements for scalable operation of commercial small UAS (sUAS). The project also aims to investigate redundancy, bandwidth, cost, computing, and data storage requirements to operate the UTM technology safely and securely on a national scale in a scalable and cost-effective manner.
The team will leverage hybrid cloud computing, ANRA’s state-of-the-art UTM platform, data-driven analytics, and Switch’s SwitchSIGHT command centers to simulate thousands of concurrent UAS flights. The aim is to realistically test the UTM system on a scale that ANRA claims is unprecedented, in order to create the most realistic UTM and BVLOS (beyond visual line of sight) ecosystem ever attempted.
Brent Klavon, VP of Operations at ANRA Technologies, commented: “We are thrilled to provide the UTM and simulation capability to research capacity limits for UAS Traffic Management (UTM) in a virtual environment.”
