Sensor synchronisation for CUAS and UTM applications

Organisations responsible for regulation, law enforcement, safety and security use dedicated Counter UAS (cUAS) and Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) systems to monitor for the presence and activity of Unmanned Arial Systems (UAS). To achieve this, multiple and dissimilar sensors need to be arranged either in clusters or distributed over large areas, such as an airport site or regional and national air corridors. Additionally, monitoring information may be provided by the UAS itself, and UTM service providers who will publish approved flight activity.

This feasibility study will consider the scenario of an airport which has a need for both cUAS and UTM systems. To effectively correlate the information generated at an airport by multiple heterogeneous sensors, and compare detected or declared UAS activity against the authorised flight plans and permissions, it is essential that a reliable, robust and accurate method of time dissemination and synchronisation is available to all nodes across the entire network.

A consortium formed of Operational Solutions, Cranfield and Hoptroff will use innovative methods of combining GNSS derived signals with terrestrial PTP over IP to efficiently and robustly transmit timing information between sensor nodes.