SADE Drone Simulation at NASA ULI
Last Tuesday, September 15, our Safety-Aware Drone Ecosystem (SADE) team participated in a NASA University Leadership Initiative (ULI) presentation titled “Who Should Enter? Reputation, Risk, and Decision Making for UAVs in Low-Altitude Airspace.” The broader SADE project, led by Prof. Jane Cleland-Huang, brings together researchers from the University of Notre Dame and other collaborating institutions to explore how small uncrewed aircraft systems can safely operate in managed airspace through fair, transparent, explainable, and consistent decision-making. The presentation highlighted several components of the ecosystem, including safety certification, proving-ground evaluation, runtime monitoring and reputation models, system architecture, and simulation.
During the presentation, Prof. Douglas Thain introduced the key components of the platform and its goal of providing a self-service environment for evaluating custom software pilots interacting with SADE Zones under challenging and realistic conditions. The platform integrates PX4, Gazebo, Unreal Engine, and realistic geographic environments, enabling researchers to create complex scenarios involving multiple drones, terrain, buildings, wind conditions, and dynamically managed airspace. The presentation highlighted several case studies developed by our team, including the Utah Mountains simulation with 40 drones, Yosemite Search and Rescue, Indianapolis Airport, and Chicago Downtown scenarios.
We also showcased videos and screenshots demonstrating different capabilities of the platform. These included drones requesting permission to enter a SADE Zone, rerouting around the zone when access was denied, experiencing the effects of realistic wind conditions generated for the simulation, and interacting with real terrain and buildings—including examples where a drone collides with a building in Chicago. Together, these demonstrations showed how SADE Simulation can be used to study drone behavior and software-pilot decisions in realistic, safety-critical environments.
It was rewarding to see the simulation work presented alongside the other components of SADE, demonstrating how the different research efforts come together toward a common goal: enabling safer and more trustworthy drone operations in increasingly complex low-altitude airspace. The talk was also a great reminder of how our day-to-day engineering work contributes to the broader NASA ULI research effort and the future of safe autonomous aviation.