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Fady Khaled, the CCUVS Chief Technology Officer, manages the range of CCUVS research and development (R&D) activities. CCUVS conducts R&D in areas related to standards development and enabling technology. The aim is to make findings freely available to facilitate and promote technology adoption by business.
CCUVS is constantly developing and expanding its unmanned systems R&D network. The first relationships were with universities and colleges in Alberta and the West of Canada, but the network is growing both nationally and internationally. The aim is to increase awareness of relevant R&D activities with a view to achieving synergies and avoiding duplication of effort.
Particular effort is devoted to recommending research topics for undergraduate and post graduate students. Not only does this increase R&D activity in the unmanned systems sector, but it also is a source of new approaches and innovative solutions.
R&D is dynamic and constantly moving forward. New requirements will emerge as unmanned systems standards work develops and operational experience grows.
Current recommendations include:
- UA Collision Avoidance
- UA Weather Avoidance
- UA Terrain Avoidance
- UAS Separation Provision/Assurance
- UAS command, control and communications (C3)
- Safe automation/levels of autonomy, intelligent control systems and certification of such software
- Packaging and integration of UGV sensor suites
- Simulation tools for all of the above
CCUVS strongly recommends the development of a Canadian national simulation environment for unmanned systems. Such an environment could serve many purposes such as
- Providing companies, universities and inventors the opportunity to experiment with innovative concepts without the expense and delay in producing hardware for T&E
- Conducting virtual trials of putative solutions and concepts
- Facilitating collaborative working between Canada’s widely spread unmanned systems stakeholders
- Virtual training
- As a testbed for compatibility, interoperability and standardisation
- As a showcase of Canadian unmanned systems capabilities
It seems that many of the simluation tools and capabilities might already exist in Canada. It would be appropriate to undertake a feasibility study into what would be required to integrate and supplement existing capabilities to deliver a full, rich simulation environment. There are several integrated simulation environments, commonly using protocols such as Higher Level Architecture (HLA) and Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS).
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