For the ITS, manned aircraft are often used but these are expensive to maintain. Unmanned aircraft equipped with monitoring systems may be able to deliver the necessary information with low operational costs. Such airborne traffic surveillance systems (ATSS) could fly along Florida's major highway corridors to continuously feed information for useful purposes.

The most likely or promising aerial platform for such a system is the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). However, using a UAV in ATSS projects involves a lot of logistics issues.

A proof of concept study is needed to determine the overall communications interfaces and operational logistics of ATSS using unmanned aircraft. This is the focus of the ATSS project led by Dr. Haniph Latchman and his colleagues with help from researchers at the LIST lab.

The thrust of the ATSS project, which is sponsored by the Florida Department of Transportation, will be the use of UAV equipment as the framework for ATSS, as well as to investigate the final integration of ATSS into FDOT’s current network and communications infrastructure.

Related Documents

S.Srinivasan, H.Latchman, "Airborne Traffic Surveillance Systems – Video Surveillance of Highway Traffic", submitted to ACM 2nd International Workshop on Video Surveillance & Sensor Networks (PDF)

H.Latchman, T.Wong, “Statement of Work for Airborne Traffic Surveillance Systems - Proof of Concept Study for Florida Department of Transportation”, October 2002. (PDF)

H.Latchman, T.Wong, “Software Documentation for Airborne Traffic Surveillance Systems”, June 2004 (PDF)