Skyways, Highways and Autonomous Area Networks

There is a lot of debris in outer-space. Some are man-made (satellites in grave-yard orbit or lost noncommunicating satellites) and some are natural (meteoroids and rocks from comets or asteroids). Once in a while, these debris get caught in the earth’s gravitational field and rapidly accelerate downwards forming fireballs or shooting stars in the process. Most will get burned up before impact but the larger ones do make impact and form meteorites. One such meteorite recently made impact in Indonesia and featured in the news, though the finder did not make $1.8-m as earlier reported.

Lately, the level of ‘debris’ in ‘inner-space’ or the ‘Skyways’ is increasing, especially with the advent of unmanned drones, their planned usage for consumer goods delivery and the accelerating futuristic development of jetpacks, sky taxis and flying cars as showcased in a recent article by the BBC. In the last seven years, there have been numerous verified collisions, alleged collisions and near misses between drones and commercial aircrafts with passengers on board. Worryingly, such drones could easily get sucked into aircraft jet engines leading to a crash and fatalities. Out-of-battery drones have also fallen from the skies and are known to have caused injury to people and animals on the ground.

With the spate of self-driving cars, driverless cars or road cars capable of autonomous operation, our Highways and Motorways are also not immune to inadvertent vehicle to vehicle or vehicle to pedestrian collisions. So far, tens of million miles of self-driving data have been amassed by autonomous vehicle manufacturers and operators with all the data currently being assessed from a safety viewpoint in order to build public trust in automated driving technologies.

Whilst there is very little that can be done to mitigate natural debris from outer space, something can definitely be done for man-made spacecraft, sky-crafts, drones, and driverless cars. Radar (RF-based) and LiDAR (laser-based) schemes are currently in use on road cars for adaptive cruise control and lane detection functions. But there must be a better way.

Enter the Autonomous Area Network or AAN. With AAN, all cars, sky-crafts or spacecrafts will share basic time-of-flight, proximity and angular elevation-plane information between themselves. If these metrics indicate that collision is imminent, the crafts will then autonomously take avoidance action (by moving to different elevation planes as an example, and by altering their time-of-flight). All these will happen between crafts and is completely transparent to the user or passenger, with the net benefit being zero collision incident. Such a scheme can also be used to prevent collisions between ships and boats, between articulated lorries and between double-decker buses and low bridges.

For AAN to become commonplace, the required hardware and chipset cost must be low. Tetrivis KuKa family of phased-array chipsets for LEOSAT Market is sufficiently low-cost for ubiquitous AAN implementation. The TRV003 (Rx) and TRV004 (Tx), the first chipsets in the family, taped out for fabrication on 30th September 2020. Both chips support four Ku-Band Dual-Beam and Dual-Polarisation Rx RF-to-Baseband and Tx Baseband-to-RF paths with limited conceptual support for Ka-Band frequencies. Detailed testing will commence on the engineering samples in January 2021, with customer Evaluation Boards available for order in Q1 2021.