Deriving sensible requirements for UAV sense-and-avoid systems

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming more prevalent in military applications and through the success of these applications, many commercial usages have been derived. However, due to the recent development of UAVs, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has not yet been able to develop performance requirements for the Detect, Sense, and Avoid (DSA) system of UAVs. For this reason, this study serves to explore the current capabilities of human general aviation (GA) pilots with regards to their see-and-avoid abilities. The midair collision rate over the past ten years and the average traffic around an average airport are also explored. With the analyzed data, a model is developed in order to extract the grounds for performance requirement for DSA systems. The determined DSA performance number can be used to further aid in the development of overall performance requirements for DSA systems.