IEEE - Aerospace and Electronic Systems - March 2021 - 23

Wang et al.

Figure 13.
Unified framework for drone safety management.

detection sensors to capture. The future UAS detection
approaches would be more mature, practical, and efficient.
The detection schemes need to be combined from multiple
sensors and fused with ground data and aerial data collaboratively. The diversity and the amount of data in types of
detection and acquisition space could be a trend to
improve. Similar to detection schemes, simple negation
approaches also could not satisfy negation requirement,
especially the countermeasures could not damage the
property of the pilots. Future negation schemes should
focus on navigating the intruding UAS to fly away the sensitive areas and no harm to the property of pilots. Of
course, the different countermeasures are promising to
achieve better performance when they are implemented
collaboratively. That means how to construct a unified
and systematic framework for the UAS safety defense
also is a challenge in the following stages. What's more, a
UAS safety defense system includes detection and negation, so how to balance the two parts in a collaborative
and unified framework is also a research focus.

INDUSTRIAL STANDARDS
Most security and safety problems are caused by the people's mistaking operation. The detailed operation and
management policy could be helpful to people to avoid
the mistakes and reduce the burden of the defenders.
These policies not only serve as guidance to the pilots, but
also standards to the industries. A guidance allows the
pilots to make awareness of flight of UAS in safety and
security and avoid the mistaking operations when the
UAS is on the flight. The industrial standards make it possible to stop the UAS when it is out of control.
The industrial standards need the market entrance
standards which limit the UAS on the market to be
controllable and identified in a physical level. Once
MARCH 2021

the UAS are instructing in restricted areas, the
defenders could be able to access the system in physical level to drive away or stop the UAS remotely.
The basic training for pilots needs to include the
safety operations and security knowledge. The specification of UAS operation training and certification
could help pilots avoid basic mistakes.

UNIFIED AND SECURED COORDINATION STRATEGIES
The discussion above shows that it is hard to protect the
public from unsafe and unauthorized drone operations by
using one single approach. Therefore, we propose a unified framework of collaborative UAS safety management,
as shown in Figure 13. The collaborated entities for UAS
safety management are:
1) Local UAS Coordinator: The local UAS authorities [2] are responsible for making use of all interfaces provided by UAS manufactures to secure the
operation of UAS and handing over UAS within
coordinator when necessary. Obviously this is a distributed management paradigm [10].
2) Existing Airspace Authorities: Existing airspace
management authorities are not required to deal
with UAS directly. It is desired for airspace management authorities to interact with the regulation
database and release information to the shared data
cube[1], [7], which is supposed to shared with local
UAS coordinators friendly. The key information
can be visualized to figure out the status of UAS
management quickly and effectively. Apart from
the data sharing, the authorities are supposed to
maintenance the security and the integrity of the
releasing data in case modified by attackers. Right
before the publication of this article, we do notice

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