Researchers at the Engineering Research Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) contributed to a recent successful joint demonstration in Fort Worth, Texas, of an unmanned aircraft system by Bell Textron Inc. and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
The CASA team provided an intuitive, integrated display to give remote pilots of the Bell Autonomous Pod Transport 70 (APT 70) enhanced weather risk awareness, including weather data from CASA’s X-band radar network, which is deployed in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. CASA was named a collaborative partner on the project in 2018.
“Weather poses a significant challenge to unmanned aircraft systems, especially in large cities, where aircraft will take off and land from vertiports and rooftops within the urban landscape, close to where people work and live. Our efforts focused on integrating weather data from multiple sources and alerting the pilots about potential weather hazards along the route,” said Apoorva Bajaj, CASA’s innovation manager, who is leading the efforts to establish an Urban Aviation Weather Test Bed in the Dallas – Fort Worth area.
CASA’s weather hazard alerting platform, known as CityWarn, was developed using grants from the Partnerships for Innovation and the Hazards and Disasters programs at the National Science Foundation. Brenda Philips, co-Director of CASA and research faculty in Electrical and Computer Engineering is the principal investigator on these grants.
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