FAA awards contract for UTM testing to Switch

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has awarded a contract for the development and testing of a UAS traffic management system (UTM) at the Nevada Institute for Autonomous Systems (NIAS) to ANRA Technologies, IT-infrastructure provider Switch.

FAA awards contract for UTM testing to Switch

The FAA will contribute $848,685 to the total Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) contract valued at $1.79 million that will b received by ANRA, Switch, and NIAS. The project aims to test and evaluate performance thresholds, mitigation strategies, operational constraints, and system requirements for the scalable operation of commercial drones or unmanned aerial systems (UAS).

A press release from ANRA states that “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. Our 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.”

New insights into redundancy, bandwidth, compute and data storage requirements to operate the UAS traffic management (UTM) system in a scalable and cost-effective way are also expect to come out of the project.

ANRA Technologies said that the UTM will be tested to “level that has never been tested before” and will “create the most realistic UTM and BVLOS [beyond visual line of sight] ecosystem ever attempted”.

“We are thrilled to provide the UTM and simulation capability to research capacity limits for UAS Traffic Management in a virtual environment,” said Brent Klavon, VP of Operations at ANRA Technologies, according to Aerospace Testing International.

“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,” said Switch Founder and CEO Rob Roy said,

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Photo: ANRA Technologies