Switch in partnership with ANRA Technologies and the Nevada Institute for Autonomous Systems (NIAS), have been announced as the recipient of a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) contract by the FAA.
The FAA awarded $848,685 towards an overall contract of $1.79 million to demonstrate and validate UAS Traffic Management (UTM) technology in coordination with NIAS test site.
“We are thrilled to provide the UTM and simulation capability to research capacity limits for UAS Traffic Management (UTM) in a virtual environment” said Brent Klavon, VP of Operations at ANRA Technologies.
Switch, the technology infrastructure corporation and ANRA will conduct demonstrations and validation of new unmanned systems, in association with NIAS to evaluate performance thresholds, mitigation strategies, operational constraints, and system requirements for scalable operation of commercial small UAS (sUAS).
Switch Founder and CEO Rob Roy said, “To be selected as a recipient of a contract by the FAA to test the Unmanned Aircraft Systems Traffic Management System at a scale never before attempted is a true honor for Switch.
“We will leverage our far-reaching Switch AMERICA independent exascale infrastructure platform, including the Switch EDGE data centers, to power the safe integration of UAS into the National Airspace System.”
Additionally, the project will also provide insight into redundancy, bandwidth, cost estimates, compute, and data storage requirements to operate the UTM safely and securely on a national scale in a scalable and cost-effective manner.
ANRA and Switch will leverage hybrid cloud computing mechanisms, a state-of-the-art UTM platform, data-driven analytics, and The SwitchSIGHT command centers to simulate thousands of simultaneous UAS flights. The team’s aim is to realistically test our UTM system to a level that has never been tested before, in order to create the most realistic UTM and BVLOS ecosystem ever attempted.
Source: Press Release