ANSI group releases UAS standardization roadmap

In late December, the Unmanned Aircraft Systems Standardization Collaborative (UASSC) of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) released a UAS roadmap to encourage a coordinated approach to future standards development.

The roadmap examines 64 issue areas and makes recommendations for UAS standards in airworthiness, flight operations, personnel training, qualifications and certification. UASSC’s goal is for broad adoption of the roadmap, which is based on a consensus of those who actively participated in its development.

The first version of the “Standardization Roadmap for Unmanned Aircraft Systems” represents the culmination of the UASSC’s work to identify existing standards and standards in development, as well as to assess gaps and make recommendations for priority areas where additional standardization or pre-standardization R&D is needed. A gap means no published standard or specification exists that covers the issue in question. In 36 cases, additional R&D is needed.

The roadmap examined 64 issue areas, identified 60 gaps and made recommendations across areas of airworthiness and flight operations—both general concerns and application-specific ones including critical infrastructure inspections, commercial services, and public safety operations. Other areas include personnel training, qualifications and certification. Of this total, 40 gaps and recommendations were identified as high priority, 17 as medium priority and three as low priority.

The UASSC envisions that the roadmap will be widely promoted and discussed over the course of 2019 to assess progress on its implementation and to identify emerging issues that require further elaboration.

UASSC was established in 2017 to coordinate and accelerate the development of the standards and conformity assessment programs needed to facilitate the safe integration of UAS into the U.S. national airspace system. The group includes more than 400 participants representing industry, government agencies, standards-developing organizations, academia and others.