A team of researchers in aerospace engineering from RMIT University including the then PhD candidates Mr Subramanian Ramasamy and Mr Alessandro Gardi, supervised by Prof Roberto Sabatini, was awarded a Graduate Student Paper Award for the paper entitled “A Unified Approach to Separation Assurance and Collision Avoidance for Flight Management Systems”. The award included a cash prize of US$ 250 and a travel grant of US$ 500. With the first edition dating back to 1975, the Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC) is a prestigious industry-leading gathering of avionics researchers and designers organised by the Institute of Electric and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, distinctive for its dual focus on both avionics and Air Traffic Management (ATM) systems. The conference theme of the 35th edition was “Enabling Avionics for Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM)” and was located in California, not far from the NASA Ames Research Center where the future for UAS traffic management is being shaped. RMIT Intelligent Transport Systems Research Group (led by Prof Rob Sabatini) is a member of the collaborative research group on UTM headed by NASA Ames and is developing new on-board and ground-based technologies that will support the safe and efficient operation of UAS in controlled airspace. The award-winning paper addresses one of the key technological challenges for integrating UAS in the ATM system by proposing advanced data fusion techniques for cooperative and non-cooperative separation assurance and collision avoidance.
