Collaborative Research: VINES: Track 2: FALCON: Flexible Aerial Links for Control, Observation, and Navigation

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and other aerial robots are transforming applications from infrastructure inspection to defense, but today's cellular networks designed for ground users struggle to serve flying systems reliably, especially around metallic obstructions and in the presence of interference or jamming. This project, named FALCON, develops next-generation (NextG) wireless technology that delivers the resilient connectivity these aerial applications need, and validates it in real outdoor flights at the NSF-funded Aerial Experimentation and Research Platform for Advanced Wireless (AERPAW) testbed at North Carolina State University on two vertical use cases of broad national interest: (1) commercial UAV-assisted building inspection, evaluated with start-up partner Tall Wall Robotics in a multi-billion-dollar built-environment services market; and (2) resilient drone swarms operating under jamming and dynamic spectrum sharing, evaluated with defense systems integrator Nexcepta. Broader impacts include workforce-development hackathons, open-source release of software and hardware reference designs, and contributions to 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and the Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) Alliance to shape NextG networking standards toward first-class support for autonomous systems. FALCON focuses on the Frequency Range 3 (FR3) spanning 6–24 GHz, a key NextG spectrum band for which no aerial-grade experimental platform exists today. The project delivers three FR3-focused innovations: (1) a lightweight single-channel FR3 transceiver, derived from an existing software-defined radio, with size, weight, and power (SWaP) suitable for aerial deployment; (2) FR3 spectral agility through layered mechanisms — microsecond-scale frequency switching at the Radio Frequency (RF) layer, band / resource-block / beam selection via an O-RAN Application, and multi-path transport that combines 3GPP cellular with non-3GPP paths; and (3) FR3 observation and cross-layer exposure, in which Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-based wideband occupancy and direction-of-arrival measurements are exposed through dedicated RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) pathways to the transport layer and to the aerial-robotics stack — the deep cross-stack co-design that defines NextG architecture. The technology is matured through phased AERPAW integration, advancing from lab integration in Year 1, to single-link outdoor flights in Year 2, to a multi-UAV capstone in Year 3 jointly evaluated by the inspection and swarm vertical partners. 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.