The Unmanned Aerial System Essay Example

The Unmanned Aerial System is a milestone technology that has enhanced not only science but also an exploration of formerly inaccessible areas. Through the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles such as drones, scientists have achieved wildfire mapping, agricultural monitoring and disaster management (Dalamagkidis, Valavanis & Piegl, 2008). The UAS has also aided the war on terrorism as evidenced by the American espionage activities in terror-ravaged countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq. Ideally, UAS has helped the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States to track down and destroy terrorist networks across the globe. Even though UAS has been marveled at as a masterpiece of technology in transforming social, economic and political welfare of humanity, they have unique challenges (Kumar & Michael, 2012). The unique difficulties with UAS include problem to be integrated into the national airspace due to maintenance difficulties as well as the legal implications due to issues such as controlling the flight height and intrusion of individual privacy that may arise due to failures.

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The regulation of UAS presents a critical legal challenge regarding maintaining consistent coordination of all its systems while at the same time controlling the risks of failure such as privacy intrusion and breach of individual safety (Alan Hobbs, 2015). Ideally, the Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) is an aggregate of the entire package including the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAVs), ground control system, camera, Geographic Positioning Systems (GPS), the software, required skills for operating the system and tools necessary for maintaining it. The fundamental challenge is mostly on the UVS. The fact that the UVS operate without an on-board pilot means that the risk of human error is transferred from the actual pilots to the ground maintenance personnel who are also not exempt from making unintentional mistakes (Alan Hobbs, 2015). Different from the conventional maintenance of aircraft, the UAV maintenance technicians must always ensure that they maintain the reliability of the vehicle, ground station and communication gadgets since a mistake in either of the three components may be tragic (Zeng, Zhang & Lim, 2016). Unlike in the conventional aircrafts where the on board pilot may actively make a decision to crash land when communication with the radar fails, the UAVs primarily rely on a ground personnel who controls it remotely meaning that a simple mechanical or signal error may breach privacy and risk the safety of people within the area being covered thus exposing the operators to lawsuits.

The fact that UVS which is a central component of the UAS does not operate with an on-board pilot makes it difficult for it to be integrated into the national airspace. In most cases, the UVSs cannot work beyond the sight of the operator since it lacks a system that can sense and avoid objects along its flight path (Alan Hobbs, 2015). The fact that most of the UVSs fly at the height of below 500 feet compounded by a lack of an on-board pilot or a traffic management at that altitude complicates the use of such technology to access areas far beyond the ground controller's field of view (Eid, Chebil, Albatsh & Faris, 2013). Unless a cutting-edge infrastructure that makes the UVSs sense and avoids both stationary and moving objects along its pathway is developed, they pose a challenge for use in extensive areas that exceed the controllers view.

Another problem with the UAS is that the Ground control Station (GCS) software are unique for each of its UAV software unless in cases where an interface standard is used. Therefore, this poses a serious challenge regarding minimization of human efforts in the GCS on issues including mission planning and verbal command. Conceptually, for the UAS systems to be efficient, the UVS needs to be equipped with the ability to process commands and decode them for a successful mission independently.

Conclusion

Almost all the UAS operate their UVSs using a system that relies on laptop computers that may experience failure. When the off the shelf computers that run the UVSs control software undergoes a mechanical problem, the ground control point cannot control the flight thus increasing the risk of crashes with other moving or stationary objects (Eid, Chebil, Albatsh & Faris, 2013). In essence, the computer acts as the UVSs glass cockpit which is the point from where the spacecraft is controlled hence a complete failure, depleted battery or virus may ruin the success of the flight since it primarily results in a discontinuation of communication with the UVS (Zeng, Zhang & Lim, 2016). Therefore, there is always a need for controllers to ensure that the computers that control such gadgets are not only airworthy but also have standby backups to take over in case one has an unexpected mechanical challenge.

References

Alan Hobbs (Mar 06, 2015). Human Challenges in the Maintenance of Unmanned Aircraft Systems. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/255447929_Human_Challenges_in_the_Maintenance_of_Unmanned_Aircraft_Systems [accessed Sep 03 2018].

Dalamagkidis, K., Valavanis, K. P., & Piegl, L. A. (2008). On unmanned aircraft systems issues, challenges and operational restrictions preventing integration into the National Airspace System. Progress in Aerospace Sciences, 44(7-8), 503-519.

Eid, B. M., Chebil, J., Albatsh, F., & Faris, W. F. (2013). Challenges of Integrating Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Civil Application. In IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering (Vol. 53, No. 1, p. 012092). IOP Publishing. http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1757-899X/53/1/012092/pdf

Kumar, V., & Michael, N. (2012). Opportunities and challenges with autonomous micro aerial vehicles. The International Journal of Robotics Research, 31(11), 1279-1291.

Zeng, Y., Zhang, R., & Lim, T. J. (2016). Wireless communications with unmanned aerial vehicles: opportunities and challenges. arXiv preprint arXiv:1602.03602.