Operational testing of unmanned aircraft system traffic management in disaster response

In October 2018, a flight test, which occurred as part of a large-scale disaster drill in Ehime Prefecture, Japan, successfully demonstrated that the Integrated Aircraft Operation System for Disaster Relief (D-NET) and Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management (UTM) can contribute to the safe and efficient use of airspace by both manned and unmanned aircraft. This paper presents the technical challenges of operating unmanned aircraft in disaster relief as well as traffic management integration and the technical solutions developed to address these challenges. The scenarios used to test the integration of both systems in a real-world context, together with flight tests results and analysis, are also shown. The flight tests successfully demonstrated the application of unmanned aircraft to disaster response and showed they can safely cooperate with manned aircraft to improve response efficiency. © 2021 by Adriana Andreeva-Mori, Daisuke Kubo, Keiji Kobayashi, Yoshinori Okuno, Jeffrey Homola, Marcus Johnson, and Parimal Kopardekar.