Flight research centre gets a lift

Flying, it is claimed, will be a lot safer and more efficient thanks to collision avoidance, emergency landing and separation management technologies being developed at a new joint Queensland University of Technology and CSIRO aerospace research centre.

The technologies could also allow unmanned aircraft to perform beneficial operations such as search and rescue, bush fire fighting and monitoring ash clouds from volcanos as well as power line inspection and crop monitoring.

The Australian Research Centre for Aerospace Automation (ARCAA) in the Da Vinci Precinct at Brisbane Airport houses more than 35 aviation research scientists and support staff. It was opened recently as another step in the consolidation of Queensland as a global aviation and aerospace hub.

ARCAA researcher and QUT lecturer Dr Luis Mejias said, "We are focusing on aviation technologies which will save lives and improve the efficiency of the aviation industry.

"For example, mid-air collisions between light planes over Australia have caused the death of eight people in the past five years. ARCAA is developing a dynamic sense-and-act system that could provide a cost-effective early warning solution to this problem.

"The system is a safety breakthrough for small planes because until now they have had to primarily rely on the pilot's vigilance to 'see-and-avoid' other planes. This can be difficult, particularly during take-off and landing when there can be a number of planes operating in a close area and when the pilot has a high workload.

"Recent flight testing has shown that these early warnings can be provided up to four times sooner than the minimum warning time required by a human pilot and, with some recently made refinements, we expect the warning time to be even longer."

The DSA uses an onboard camera, graphics processing hardware and sophisticated image processing algorithms to detect mid-air collisions.

Meanwhile, Ergon Energy executive Ian McLeod said the company had partnered with QUT, the Queensland government and industry to investigate the use of fully automated aerial technology for monitoring vegetation and its impact on the network.

"Already as part of this project we have completed aerial remote inspections of a number of regional Queensland towns and some rural networks using laser scanners and digital cameras. From this data we have developed the ability to automatically identify vegetation encroaching into powerline zones," McLeod said.