Supporting Disaster Relief Operations through UTM: Operational Concept and Flight Tests of Unmanned and Manned Vehicles at a Disaster Drill

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has been developing a system to manage resource allocation during disaster response operations and to optimize the application of available assets (D-NET). NASA has been engaged in research to enable the large-scale commercial application of UAS in low altitude airspace as part of the UAS Traffic Management (UTM) project. Since 2016, JAXA and NASA have partnered to investigate the safe and efficient integration of UAS in disaster relief operations. In October 2018, a flight test, which occurred as part of a large-scale disaster drill in Ehime Prefecture, Japan, successfully demonstrated that D-NET and UTM can contribute to the safe and efficient use of airspace by both manned and unmanned aircraft. This paper presents the technical challenges in UAS integration in disaster relief and D-NET/UTM integration and 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 UASs to disaster response and showed they can safely cooperate with manned aircraft to improve response efficiency.