MIT's New Algorithm To Prevent Mid-Air Collisions

The Federal Aviation Administrations (FAA) has mandated that by year 2020, all commercial aircrafts and small airplanes flying near the airports should be should be equipped with the new GPS (Global Positioning System) based tracking system. The new system will ensure accurate location data for aircrafts and help in preventing mid-air collisions. Statistics show that approximately 10-12 small aircrafts undergo mid-air collision every year. FAA has commissioned a team of MIT's researchers and scientists to investigate the system's limits and capabilities and submit their report in October 2011 at the 30th Digital Avionics Systems Conference in Seattle.

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Image Credit: Christine Daniloff

"Limiting the false alarms" was the single biggest challenge in designing the anti-collision system for aircrafts, said Maxime Gariel of MIT. Gariel is a postdoc in MIT’s International Center for Air Transportation. Nearly 50% of the times, the alarms are false alarms and not very reliable. GPS data is more reliable than RADAR, but it's not perfect. Same goes with the communication systems and channels that aircrafts use to communicate their respective location data. The information isn't 100% accurate and prediction of plane's position can go wrong if the plane changes trajectory. The researchers are working on optimization of the trade-off between false alarms and error-tolerance of the anti-collision systems. Currently, work is being carried out on developing a two-tire system - a mild alarm to inform the pilots of the planes when the system detects their trajectories are converging and stronger alarm when the system determines a strong possibility of collision.

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