RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES IN AERONAUTICS 2015 NRA APPENDIX B.4 SAFE AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS OPERATIONS PROJECT | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

NASA Headquarters, through its Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD), released a 2015 Research Opportunities in Aeronautics (ROA) NASA Research Announcement (NRA) focused on the Safe Autonomous Systems Operations (SASO) Project under Appendix B.4. Listed as funding opportunity number NNH15ZEA001N SASO1, this discretionary program uses a Cooperative Agreement instrument to support science and technology research and development under CFDA 43.002 (Aeronautics). The competition was open to essentially any eligible organization (unrestricted eligibility, subject to any clarifications in the solicitation), and it did not require cost sharing or matching. The opportunity was posted on June 22, 2015, with Notices of Intent (NOIs) due June 29, 2015, and full proposals due August 3, 2015 (with the archive date listed as June 22, 2016).

The SASO Project is framed around a central operational challenge: keeping the National Airspace System (NAS) highly efficient, predictable, agile, scalable, safe, and affordable while the aviation ecosystem becomes more complex. NASA positions this as not only a safety and capacity issue, but also a competitiveness issue, aiming to sustain global leadership and domestic viability by advancing technology and enabling new business models for airspace operations. The project emphasizes future airspace needs in the ATM3 time horizon, with an eye toward operations in and beyond 2035, where demand, vehicle diversity, and operational complexity are expected to be much higher than today.

At its core, SASO seeks research that makes a defensible, safety-justified use of automation and autonomy to handle that increased complexity. The solicitation highlights several drivers that proposals should implicitly or explicitly address: growing mobility of passengers and goods; supporting a much more diverse mix of vehicles and uses of airspace (including interactions with things like wind turbines and commercial space launch activities); safely scaling to meet future demand; and accommodating a wider range of operating concepts and business models such as hub-and-spoke, point-to-point, air taxi concepts, and other sharing or on-demand models. NASA also distinguishes among automation, autonomy (self-governance), and autonomicity (self-management), signaling interest in systems that can do more than follow pre-programmed scripts and can manage themselves within well-defined safety and operational boundaries.

The Appendix B.4 call lays out nine specific subtopics meant to anchor foundational research in support of SASO. Several of these are system-level studies intended to shape future concepts of operations and architectures. One subtopic calls for identifying opportunities for increasingly autonomous operations, with particular emphasis on traffic flow management and closely spaced parallel runway operations, which are notoriously demanding from a safety and precision standpoint. Another asks for system studies to propose ab initio (clean-slate) architecture approaches capable of meeting future airspace operational needs, explicitly targeting 2035 and beyond. These system studies are meant to map out what the future operational environment could look like and what foundational design choices would best support safe autonomy at scale.

Other subtopics focus on assurance, enabling technologies, and human integration. Safety assurance for increasingly autonomous systems is called out directly, reflecting the reality that higher levels of autonomy raise hard questions about verification, validation, certification pathways, and how to build justified confidence in behavior across normal and off-nominal conditions. A separate subtopic targets advanced Communication, Navigation, and Surveillance (CNS) options for unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) operations across all altitudes, with explicit requirements that these options be universal, reliable, always available, cyber-secure, and affordable. This points to practical deployment concerns: autonomy is only as viable as the communications and surveillance ecosystem that supports it, and those links must be resilient and secure enough for operational acceptance.

Human interaction with autonomy is another major theme. The solicitation includes human-autonomy teaming as a dedicated subtopic, recognizing that near- and mid-term autonomy will often be introduced into environments where humans remain responsible for supervision, delegation, intervention, and shared decision-making. Closely related are subtopics focused on understanding UAV situational awareness issues and defining intervention procedures for off-nominal events, aiming to clarify what information operators need, how problems should be detected and surfaced, and what safe intervention looks like when automation encounters conditions it cannot handle alone. The call also includes interactivity and mobility decision modeling, indicating interest in modeling how decisions are made in complex, interactive environments where multiple agents (humans, autonomous vehicles, and automated services) influence one another.

The remaining research topics extend the autonomy theme into specific operational domains. One subtopic addresses small UAS trajectory modeling approaches, which matters because low-altitude operations involve unique constraints (dense obstacles, variable winds, limited separation margins, mixed participants) and because accurate trajectory prediction is central to conflict detection, deconfliction, and scalable traffic management. Another subtopic focuses on concepts and technologies supporting reduced crew operations for commercial carriers, reflecting industry interest in new cockpit/crew paradigms and the safety case required to move toward them. Across these themes, the solicitation consistently points back to the need for foundational methods that can credibly assure autonomous behavior, especially where operations become denser, more diverse, and less tolerant of failures.

NASA also provides practical guidance on where and how to access the full solicitation and any amendments. Offerors were instructed to use NSPIRES (http://nspires.nasaprs.com/) by navigating to Solicitations, Open Solicitations, then selecting NASA ARMD Research Opportunities in Aeronautics (ROA 2015) under NNH15ZEA001N and choosing the relevant program element, specifically the link titled "B.4 Safe Autonomous Systems Operations Project." NASA also notes that procurement-related documents are available online and that proposers are responsible for monitoring the NASA Business Opportunities site for amendments and for downloading their own copies of the solicitation and updates. Finally, the announcement underscores the competitive nature of the program and indicates NASA would not engage in direct discussions about specific proposals, directing questions instead through the formal channels described in the solicitation. Contact points provided include Susan Minor (roa@nasa.gov) and NAIS Support (nais.support@nasa.gov) for access issues and administrative help.

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