CCUVS is establishing a Canadian Unmanned Aircraft Systems Standards Working Group to develop standards for UAS operations, personnel and system products. The purpose of this group is to develop standards for consideration by the Authority, Transport Canada, which might act as the basis for the Authority to develop regulations for routine UAS civil and commercial operation.

The first focus of the CUASSWG is on UAS with a maximum take off weight of less than 35kg. There is some urgency to develop standards for routine UAS operation in Canada and the aim is to make as rapid progress as possible.

It envisaged that there will be a Plenary meeting of the CUASSWG every three months. It is likely that there will be sub-groups focusing on Operations, Personnel and Technical Standards (including command, control and collision avoidance), which will progress their work between Plenary meetings by a combination of meetings, teleconferences, email and the use of remote meeting tools. This website will serve as the repository of working papers and reference material.

Anyone interested in learning more about this important activity should contact Dewar Donnithorne-Tait via the Contact Us Page.

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,
• A test bed for compatibility, interoperability and standardization, and/or
• A showcase of Canadian unmanned systems capabilities.

It seems that many of the simulation 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 and rich simulation environment. There are several integrated simulation environments, commonly using protocols such as Higher Level Architecture (HLA) and Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS).