Aircraft surveillance and collision avoidance using GPS

Avoidance of in-flight collisions requires accurate and timely information on aircraft position and velocity. This information is obtained today by a ground-based surveillance system that is limited in accuracy, coverage and automation. A new concept for integrated navigation and surveillance suggests that every aircraft will periodically broadcast its position as determined by an on-board GPS receiver. The position reports will be received by Air Traffic Control ground facilities and will be used for aircraft tracking and conflict resolution.;The key to the successful application of this concept is a reliable data link architecture that will allow all aircraft within a specified detection range to exchange information at a required rate. In this research, the basic parameters and relationships that govern the data link channel capacity are identified, and bounds on the performance of several random-access and self-organized communication protocols are set.;Unique adaptive algorithms for aircraft tracking are designed and tested. The resulting tracking accuracy is shown to be superior to the performance of modern, multiple-model radar trackers. The improvement in tracking accuracy provides the means to reduce aircraft separation standards and to decrease the runway spacing required for independent parallel approaches, all without affecting the safety level.;Moreover, since each aircraft can receive the position reports of its neighbors, a highly accurate airborne collision avoidance system can be designed. The three-dimensional positioning information provided by GPS, coupled with new collision detection and avoidance algorithms can provide timely alarms with a low false alarm rate. This significantly improves the performance of the current airborne collision avoidance system.