Blog Post

Ohio Selects Team for Unmanned Aerial Systems Traffic Management Contract

Katherine Jerome • Mar 26, 2020

CAL Analytics Leads Drone Companies & Ohio Universities Partner to Win Milestone Project

Beavercreek, OH – CAL Analytics recently secured a $1.4M contract with the Ohio Federal Research Network (OFRN) to lead the development of a contingency management platform (CMP) for beyond visual line of sight drone operations. Interoperability, Resiliency and Contingency Management for Ohio UAS Operations is one of six projects awarded in round four of OFRN’s Sustaining Ohio Aeronautical Readiness and Innovation Next Generation (SOARING) initiative. The collaborative effort brings together private companies--ResilienX, TruWeather Solutions, Kongsberg Geospatial, with higher education partners-- Kent State University, and The Ohio State University.

OFRN is a program of the Wright State Applied Research Corporation, and has the mission to stimulate Ohio’s innovation economy through job and product creation by building statewide collaborations between university researchers, Ohio-based federal laboratories and businesses. OFRN’s SOARING initiative leverages funding from Ohio’s unique aerospace assets in overcoming critical technical barriers and business challenges to enable more widespread adoption of UAS into the national airspace.

As the prime contractor, CAL Analytics will lead system integration on the ground in Ohio, deploying the CMP to two customers: the Ohio Department of Transportation in Columbus, and the Air Force Research Lab in Springfield.

“We are really excited about this project, as it will start layering in some of the safety measures and procedures that are critical to operationalize routine UAS operations,” said Sean Calhoun, managing director of CAL Analytics and project lead. “We think this project will put a nice spotlight on Ohio and all the great UAS development work that is happening here.”

ResilienX, will contribute its proprietary software tool, FRAIHMWORK, that provides a robust health and integrity monitoring platform to ensure the safety and resiliency of networked systems.

“ From our experience working with drones in the national air space, we know there are two difficult questions that the industry will have to answer: How do you know everything is working correctly? And, what do you do when something goes wrong? Deploying our CMP in Ohio is the first step to answering these important questions for this burgeoning industry,” said Andrew Carter, president & CTO of ResilienX.

Geospatial software company, Kongsberg Geospatial , will contribute IRIS UxS: a real-time airspace visualization system for Beyond Visual Line-of-Sight (BVLOS) mission management that allows a single operator to manage multiple aircraft. The system combines live data from a variety of sensors to create a real-time picture of the airspace where UAS are being operated.

“For the past few years, we’ve been working on improving safety for BVLOS UAS missions through the development of IRIS UxS,” said Company Vice President, Paige Cutland. “The IRIS system is now actively deployed for a variety of long-range mission applications including drone delivery, pipeline inspection and emergency airspace operations.”

TruWeather Solutions will deploy its dynamic platform that collects and presents real-time, predictive micro-weather analytics and insights.

"Our goal is to be the best UAS weather service in the world,” said Don Berchoff, CEO of TruWeather. “To be the best in a data-centric business, your data better be as accurate as possible, trusted and reliable. Our collaboration with Ohio will raise TruWeather to the forefront as a data-trusted micro-weather service to keep people on the ground safe and airframes productive."

The project also includes two Ohio-based universities. Kent State brings extensive knowledge of air traffic control (ATC) and the national airspace.

“We will be using our state-of-the-art ATC Simulator to test BVLOS capabilities and interaction of UAS Traffic Management with the current ATC infrastructure,” said Jenna Merriman, a lecturer with the University. “We are most excited to be a part of a project that could help in the architecture of UAS airspace.”

Ohio State was selected for its expertise in resilience engineering and human-autonomy teaming.

Dr. Martijn IJtsma, assistant-professor at OSU ’s Integrated Systems Engineering department said, “OSU has a long and successful track record studying resilience in complex, safety-critical systems. One of the challenges for contingency management in UTM is to design the system and

its operations to support fluent coordination and adaptation between multiple distributed actors. We use modeling and simulation techniques to identify how we can support joint activity during edge case scenarios and make recommendations for creating a resilient UTM system.”

The project is a few weeks into the 18-month period of performance and is expected to wrap up during the summer of 2021 with final demonstrations to take place in both Springfield and Columbus, Ohio.

Ohio Launches Traffic Management System for Drone Operations

By Sean Calhoun • 26 Mar, 2024
Columbus, OH – CAL Analytics, in coordination with the Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT), has launched a low-altitude air traffic management system for drones to support statewide operations. As the number of uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS), or drones, grows, a robust system for managing the low-altitude airspace where these aircraft operate is necessary to ensure safety. While the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) provides air traffic control for traditional aircraft flying in certain airspaces, low-altitude traffic management for drones is the responsibility of individual operators. Currently, drone pilots are required to keep the aircraft within sight to avoid a collision. A UAS Traffic Management (UTM) system enhances safety by enabling sharing of flight details between UAS operators, providing a digital tool for flight planning, and allowing operators to eventually operate beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) while continuing to minimize the risk of collision. “The introduction of this vital capability continues Ohio’s tradition of innovation in the aviation community while prioritizing safety,” said Rich Fox, director of the Ohio UAS Center at ODOT. “As we collaborate with others at the newly opened National Advanced Air Mobility Center of Excellence, we expect this to be the first of many industry-leading activities coming out of that state-of-the-art facility.” Following several state sponsored research efforts to determine the best way to develop and deploy traffic management for uncrewed aircraft in Ohio, this system, implemented by CAL Analytics, provides interoperability where any user can enroll to share and receive flight information. As drone technology continues to advance, traffic management will be a key enabler of BVLOS operations, which currently require special permission from the FAA once stringent safety requirements are met. “We couldn’t be more thrilled to continue our collaboration with ODOT by deploying this discovery and synchronization services to fully realize this first of a kind operational UTM capability throughout the state of Ohio,” said Dr. Sean Calhoun, managing director of CAL Analytics. “This realization is the result of a lot of industry development, including the essential work from The Ohio State University research team and sponsored research from the Ohio Federal Research Network (OFRN). We are looking forward to working with the various interested stakeholders throughout the state and the FAA to learn from this system and to start scaling UAS operations throughout Ohio.” ODOT and the City of Hilliard will be the first organizations to enroll in the system and begin exchanging information as they look to leverage UAS as a tool for everything from inspection and traffic monitoring to onsite situational awareness for first responders, such as police and fire department dispatches. “Hilliard is excited to leverage this and other airspace services that Ohio has established to enable our first responder drone operations” says Deputy Police Chief for Hilliard, Ron Clark. “These services will be critical for us to achieve FAA approval and operate our drones in a safe and effective manner.” In the coming years, more advanced and BVLOS drone operations will increase in Ohio, which means multiple operators may be flying in the same area to deliver medical supplies, perform emergency services, conduct infrastructure inspections, and even deliver commercial packages. For safe and successful scaling of commercial drone operations, it’s imperative that pilots have situational awareness for strategic deconfliction. While both private and public organizations can enroll in the traffic management system, this resource is particularly valuable for other state agencies and local governments across Ohio. These services are available at no cost to any operator or fleet manager that requests access and goes through the onboarding process. To learn more or request access, please contact CAL Analytics at info@calanalytics.com.

CAL Analytics to provide statewide UTM/UAS services to Ohio

By Sean Calhoun • 03 May, 2023
Columbus, OH – CAL Analytics has been selected by the Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) to provide statewide Uncrewed Aircraft System (UAS) operation services using CAL’s UAS Service Supplier (USS) platform. This agreement is the culmination of a multi-year build-up of CAL’s UTM service platform that started in 2019 with a $1.4M award from the Ohio Federal Research Network (OFRN) to develop an interoperable and resilient contingency management system for Ohio UAS Operations. Through this work, Ohio continues its leadership in the innovation, research, development and utilization of UAS technology. CAL’s USS will provide ODOT a wide array of services, including a centralized monitoring and management capability of statewide infrastructure, such as communications, navigation and airspace surveillance equipment, critical for UAS Beyond Visual Line-of-Sight operations. Additionally, CAL will provide ODOT with enhanced operational planning and situational awareness for its extensive statewide utilization of UAS for Visual Line-of-Sight operations. “Ohio and ODOT in particular, has been on the forefront of embracing UAS technology, so we are very excited to have our USS platform provide the basis for statewide utilization,” said Dr. Sean Calhoun, Managing Director of CAL Analytics. “We have put a lot of our system development focus making sure our platform provides a host of performance and safety related features. Our work with NASA and integrating our health and integrity monitoring capabilities into our deployments will ensure statewide systems can scale in a robust and safe way.” “CAL Analytics technology will help us take support of our uncrewed aircraft operations to the next level. Not only will our remote pilots use it for situational awareness and safety, but we are exploring the ability to expand this service to first responders across the state to better coordinate air support during an emergency,” said Rich Fox, UAS Director – Ohio UAS Center for ODOT. This agreement between CAL Analytics and the Ohio Department of Transportation is big win for the State of Ohio and the state of UAS ecosystem growth. Ohio is a leader in the Advanced Air Mobility business development aspect of UAS operations and the individuals involved in the OFRN are proud to have played a part in supporting new technology and innovation development,” said Maj Gen (Ret.) Mark Bartman, OFRN Program Executive for Parallax Advanced Research.

In-time System-wide Safety Assurance (ISSA) System Deployed to Ohio UTM

By Sean Calhoun • 09 Sep, 2022
Columbus, OH – CAL Analytics has been awarded a NASA Phase II-E Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award to deploy their Health & Integrity System (HIMS) to the Ohio Department of Transportation’s Uncrewed Traffic Management (UTM) system. This will be the first-time an In-time System-wide Safety Assurance (ISSA) system will be deployed and integrated into a functioning UTM environment for operations in an urban environment. This initiative is researching ways in which the resiliency and robustness of UTM ecosystems can and should be improved. The primary result of those activities was the formulation of a flexible, service-based architecture for Health & Integrity (H&I) monitoring, assessment, and mitigation of complex, federated System of Systems (SoS). This aptly named Health & Integrity Management System (HIMS) adds another dimension of capability to the UTM architecture wherein it is intended to holistically monitor and respond to the ecosystem, providing continuity between independent UTM services from a system reliability perspective “Being able to evaluate our ISSA implementation in an operational environment that Ohio offers will be a critical step for validating the our various HIMS safety monitors and system interactions what will be key to ensuring a robust UTM ecosystem for safe low-altitude operations,” said Dr. Sean Calhoun, Managing Director of CAL Analytics. “Our HIMS system not only provides various real-time monitoring of key systems, such as surveillance and navigation, but we also provide capabilities assessing the impacts to operations and how to relay that information to operators.” The CAL HIMS system builds off the Resilienx, Inc. FRAIHMWORK platform to realize a scalable ISSA system tailored specifically to UTM applications. The open architecture approach to the ISSA system enables seamless integration of future system monitoring and scalability. The effort builds off Ohio and NASA’s existing AAM National Campaign partnership, which includes System-Wide Safety, and The Ohio State Universities UTM development effort sponsored by the Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT). “Safety is the number one goal at the Ohio Department of Transportation, operational assurance is the most important component in any aviation operation. As we continue to move towards highly automated and remote operations in the airspace, the health of systems and sensors providing information becomes crucial to maintain the safety for transportation on the ground and in the air,” said Fred Judson, UAS Director – Ohio UAS Center for ODOT. “Safety is the key to innovation in aviation. Learning how and when to automate our safety monitoring, assessment, and mitigation functions enables us to design air systems that benefit all of us.” said Dr. Misty Davies, NASA’s Project Manager for System-Wide Safety Project.
Show More
Share by: