VINES: Track 2: NSF-NICT: Enabling Low Altitude Economy with Open, Integrated Sensing, and Communications NextG RAN (Miageru)

There is an emergent global interest in developing significant economic activity and industry around low-altitude airspace (up to about 10,000 feet), referred to as the low-altitude economy. This ambition is primarily driven by the evolution of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs), such as drones and other autonomous types of vehicles and aircraft. A critical step in the evolution of this new economy lies in safe and resilient integration of UASs into broader airspace. Conventional airport surveillance radars were deployed at major airports to track and monitor participating aircraft. Going beyond major airports and participating aircraft will require dedicated surveillance deployments, and these can be prohibitively expensive. This project posits that Next Generation Mobile Networks (NextG) and, in particular, Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) technology offer unprecedented opportunities to address this challenge and foster the emergence of the low-altitude economy. This project – called Miageru – is a collaborative effort between the United States and Japan to establish capabilities for the practical implementation of Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN)-based ISAC using NextG, to support the integration of UAS into Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management (UTM). Miageru will leverage translation-ready ISAC technology developed by the Miageru team towards UAS vertical applications, and, subsequently, integrate it with NextG networking technology as well as UTM systems, and demonstrate its viability in both small and large-scale scenarios proposed by the vertical partners of Miageru. Miageru will deliver its intellectual merit through four inter-connected thrusts: (i) Thrust 1 will scale-up ISAC technology to scenarios that involve multiple UASs, and address the inherent synchronization problem; (ii) Thrust 2 will integrate the ISAC technology with an O-RAN-based intelligent slicing framework to support UAS; (iii) Thrust 3 will develop methods for interconnecting O-RAN-based ISAC with UTM; (iv) Thrust 4 will develop a security and protocol hardening framework. The technology will be integrated and validated in UAS facilities in the U.S. and Japan and demonstrated at scale in Japan with two use cases: (1) critical infrastructure monitoring and (2) rural delivery, with both cooperating and non-cooperating UAS. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.