Microsoft

Contact/client Lee Stott <leestott@microsoft.com>

To enable drones to fly over long distances without human oversight they must be able to plan routes that meet certain operating and safety criteria. For example, a delivery drone may need to make a number of deliveries within a time constraint, while public safety and policing may require repeated surveys of a specific area or location. Different drones have different capabilities; some can hover, others cannot, while others regular more regular charging. Routing drone traffic safely through our skies is therefore challenging: avoiding airspace restrictions, manned aviation and ground hazards, like schools and parks.

Your goal is to create a cloud-based air traffic control system that solves these challenges using Altitude Angel’s safety data, can receive and de-conflict “flight plans” and also efficiently route drone traffic by making route alterations in real-time so they can avoid each other, manned aviation and even gatherings of people as identified automatically from geotagged social media, road traffic information or cell phone location data.

Notes:

Altitude Angel can provide sophisticated drone simulation software so that the team can model the inputs from multiple drones without needing physical hardware, however the goal will be to implement and test the final solution with drone hardware, which we’ll supply.

Altitude Angel have a fairly robust cloud platform running now from which the students will be able to obtain the majority of the data they’ll need. Some data, such as mobile phone location data/traffic flow data) they have not yet integrated, so if there is a source of this available that the University can assist with that would be greatly appreciated.

As part of the project we will arrange for access to a development environment into which members of the team will be given all the access required to utilise our data.