Working alongside engineering, consulting and construction company Black & Veatch, Rockwell Collins successfully completed a beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) UAS flight along nearly 10 miles of power line infrastructure owned by Ameren Corp., located near Newton, Illinois.

“Monitoring critical infrastructure, particularly those in rural areas beyond line of sight, can be done much more efficiently and effectively through the use of UAS technology,” says Ken Schreder, vice president, Strategic Programs, Information Management Services at Rockwell Collins.

“We’ve created a mobile BVLOS system with networked command and control capability which enables us to demonstrate the benefits to infrastructure customers.”

The companies used knowledge that they gained from participating in the FAA Focus Area Pathfinder BNSF Railway program, and they applied a similar safety case to demonstrate that the Rockwell Collins’ CNPC-1000 Command and Control data link and webUAS operations management technology are usable in other industries with “long linear operations,” such as inspecting several miles' worth of power lines.

Rockwell Collins’ operations management tool, webUAS, coordinates the multi-node CNPC network, acts as a gateway to weather, air traffic and critical information and services, and provides real-time situational awareness to flight safety critical information such as link quality.

​For this flight, the temporary network that enabled the CNPC-1000 radio connectivity was engineered, designed and procured by Black & Veatch, and Black & Veatch was also involved in a “joint project management effort with Ameren to coordinate all the various parties involved in the test flights.”

“UAS delivers a powerful asset management platform and combines Black & Veatch’s experience and capabilities in the design and deployment of command and control communication networks and utility business knowledge,” says John Janchar, executive vice president of Telecommunications for Black & Veatch.

Safety observers from the Northern Plains UAS Test Site and the University of Iowa’s Operator Performance Laboratory (OPL) supported the demonstration, and the OPL worked with Rockwell Collins on the integration of the CNPC-1000 into the test vehicle, and the UAS' configuration and flying for the demonstration. 

The Rockwell Collins data link, which is designated the CNPC-1000, “conforms to the industry-developed performance standard for command and control submitted to the FAA by the RTCA Special Committee 228 for commercial UAS operations in the national airspace.”

Along with the FAA and NASA, Rockwell Collins has flown the CNPC-1000 on several different aircraft.

For this demonstration, the CNPC-1000 was modified to “support low altitude BVLOS operations in support of critical infrastructure monitoring to radio frequency spectrum beyond the frequencies cited by SC-228.”