Similar to the popularity of blockchain technology, you may have seen the term UTM a lot recently.
What is UTM?
Well, UTM (UAS Traffic Management) isn’t a true reality, yet. Major players like NASA, Intel, and Amazon have developed frameworks and tested concepts, but UTM is very much in its nascency.
Thought leaders have considered calling it “Universal Traffic Management,” which may give better insight into what it will become--a set of systems and services across multiple organizations and industries that will regulate the entire airspace, from consumer drones to commercial planes to air taxis, and more.
There’s still lots of work to be done, and leaders across the board agree it is a prerequisite for mass-scale drone adoption.
Kevin Gallagher, CEO of Simulyze, sees a large need for data processing in the drone industry. When it comes to data and UTM, he said on The UAV Digest podcast last month, the industry still needs to answer: how to work in a distributed environment, how to process big data in real time, and how to be able to coordinate automated negotiations in managements systems.
Operational intelligence is an integral component to successful UTM because data in a vacuum isn’t beneficial, itself. Regulators and operators need to be able to trust the telemetry data that drones beacon and be capable of extracting it for useful meaning in dynamic, real time settings.
