Sensors for Unmanned Traffic Management

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) applications have bloomed, ranging from aerial surveillance to remote infrastructure monitoring, freight delivery, geophysics surveying, and so on. In order to guarantee drone operations safety, UAS Traffic Management (UTM) systems are being developed and progressively introduced into service. They are formed of a collection of distributed pre-flight and real-time traffic coordination services, enabling pilot situation awareness (regarding nearby traffic, weather hazards, obstacles, aerospace limitations, etc.) and separation (both at the strategic and tactical level). Especially for real time/tactical coordination, there is a clear need for accurate and robust sensors both in the unmanned aircraft and on the ground, particularly when operating in critical areas (near airports, densely populated areas, etc.). Those sensors are not only related to UAS positioning, navigation and tracking (e.g., non-cooperative surveillance and anti-drone sensors), but should also contribute to the acquisition of contextual information relevant to UTM, such as weather or communication coverage maps. Additionally, the processing of their measurements, increasingly relying on Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, is of paramount importance.

The aim of this Special Issue is to solicit papers from academia and industry researchers with original and innovative works on all aspects of UTM-related sensors and multi-sensor data fusion, which review and report on the state of the art, highlight challenges, and point to future directions.

Dr. Juan Alberto Besada Portas
Prof. Dr. Roberto Sabatini
Guest Editors

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