PROVO, Utah - Remember when the co-founder of the game studio that made early Call of Duty titles accidentally crashed his drone into a firefighting plane battling the flames raging across Los Angeles last month? Turns out, mishaps like that can be avoided for not a lot of money. In fact, researchers at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Utah believe it can be done using an ad-hoc air traffic control setup for drones at a cost of just a few hundred dollars, Abhimanyu Ghoshal writes for New Atlas. Continue reading original article.
The Military & Aerospace Electronics take:
13 February 2025 - "Radar has been around for a long time," said Karl Warnick, co-author and BYU professor of electrical and computer engineering. "Instead of having a $10 million spinning dish like you’d see at an airport, we have a simple thing that could be built for a few hundred dollars. The small radars don’t have all the capabilities of a higher-end radar, but a network of small radars can work together effectively."
Sharman Gill writes for BYU how the air traffic control (ATC) system works: "Multiple ground station computers are connected to radar units, which are distributed around an area. These radar units are pointed toward the sky to detect any moving objects within their field of view. When a radar unit identifies an object, it records the position of that object in addition to the radar unit itself. This information is then converted to a global coordinate frame to be shared with other ground stations to create a comprehensive, time-varying picture of air traffic in the area."
Information from BYU is available here: https://news.byu.edu/intellect/air-traffic-control-for-drones-byu-engineers-introduce-low-cost-uav-detection-technology.
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Jamie Whitney, Senior Editor
Military + Aerospace Electronics
