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A team of Cornell University students are turning heads within industry and the federal government with the results of their research into creating a national air transportation management system in which thousands of drones could safely operate together.

NASA is sponsoring their work through the University Student Research Challenge (USRC), which provides grants to college students interested in helping the agency realize its aeronautical research goals.

“Looking at new traffic management systems for drones is not new,” said Mehrnaz Sabet, a doctoral student in the field of information science who serves as principal investigator on the grant and leads the Cornell team. “In fact, NASA has led that effort for years.”

Now, through USRC, NASA is giving Sabet and her team the chance to offer up innovative approaches to drone safety by managing their movements in the air, taking advantage of their young minds and fresh ideas.

The ultimate benefit of Cornell’s research in this area is the full realization of advanced air mobility, an area of industry focus that includes everything from urban flying taxis, more robust disaster response aircraft, and hot fresh pizza delivered right to your door.

The work also underscores the value NASA places on maturing cutting-edge technologies and helping to develop its future workforce through initiatives like USRC.

“Sabet and her team have demonstrated versatile skills involving software, algorithms, hardware, sensors development, laboratory tests, simulations, and actual flight tests – a rare combination,” said Parimal Koperdekar, acting director of NASA’s Airspace Operations and Safety Program.

Flying drones like we drive

Currently, drone operators must file plans that fully describes the intended flight path of the drone with a traffic management service. Those plans are checked with others to ensure there will be no collisions – what Sabet calls strategic deconfliction.

The challenge is that today’s air traffic management system is limited in its ability to handle the growing number of aircraft taking to the sky. Adding thousands of drones to the mix during the coming years risks over burdening the system, Sabet said.

What is needed in the air is essentially what we have on the ground – where millions of people drive on a road every day, she said.

As a driver you might know your whole “trajectory,” or the path you’d follow to reach your destination. But you would never coordinate your plan with every other driver on the road before you leave. Instead, traffic laws and infrastructure such as stop lights and traffic signs allow you to deconflict with other cars as you go.

Drone operators will still have to file flight plans saying where they intend to go, but the idea is to incorporate that car-like flexibility into drone operating systems, allowing them to be adaptable during their journeys.

“We need to ensure all these different types of drones can tactically deconflict with each other so that it is safe for them to operate like cars do on the ground. And that missing piece – tactical deconfliction – is at the center of our project,” Sabet said.

Two worlds joined

The key to the Cornell team’s research is the notion of integrating a simulated world with the real one to test and demonstrate how drones can learn to adapt to potentially hazardous conditions and make necessary corrections in their flight path on their own.

Knowing they could not go out and fly 100 drones at the same time to test their ideas for tactical deconfliction, the students decided to create an entirely virtual urban world to evaluate different high-volume traffic models, separation algorithms, and related data.

“Our first year of the project went into adapting and scaling that simulation engine and it all went very well,” Sabet said. “But we didn’t want to stick to a simulation. We wanted to see how the simulation translated to the real world, which mattered more.”

Still hampered by the limitations of how many drones they could operate and where they could fly – not many and basically in the middle of nowhere – they sought the best of both worlds, real and imagined.

“What we wound up doing was to embed the simulation into a real drone, so the drone thought it was flying in a dense urban environment although it was actually flying out in an open field where there wasn’t a real city in sight,” Sabet said.

before

after

beforeafter

before

after

drone flight test

Combing real and simulated worlds

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Image Details

The image at left (BEFORE) shows a Cornell University student-designed and built drone flying in the open above an isolated, rural field. The image at right (AFTER) shows the simulated urban environment the real drone “thinks” its flying in as it calculates all the imaginary drones’ flight paths (the blue and yellow lines) to find the best trajectory to safely avoid a collision. This combining of real and simulated worlds allows the drone to safely test its traffic avoidance technologies.

Real world lessons

This allowed the team to try out different traffic management tools and evaluate how drones might coordinate course corrections and avoid collisions with each other.

During the past year, they’ve taken the idea further by flying two real drones in the real world, each running the real-time simulation on board, allowing them to coordinate and “see” both simulated traffic and each other within the integrated test environment.

“We would then intentionally put them on a direct collision course to stress-test the detect and avoid and coordination models and see how well they react and coordinate the drone’s maneuvers to avoid hitting each other,” Sabet said.

Their success struck a chord with NASA experts in Unmanned Aircraft Systems Traffic Management (UTM).

“What’s impressive is that Cornell’s study included over 10,000 runs involving more than one million trajectories, and over 200,000 hours of experimentation to understand how multi-agent decentralized coordination would safely take place,” Kopardekar said.

Industry and the Federal Aviation Administration have also responded positively to this research and its potential. The team was asked to use its infrastructure and technology to virtually recreate an incident in 2025 in which a pair of drones collided with a stationary crane in Arizona. The team also showed how the accident could have been prevented.

The team was also asked to simulate recent, real-world fires in California to showcase how drones could better coordinate their movements both to provide situational awareness for public safety officials on the ground and to stay clear of fire-suppressing air tankers.

And according to the Cornell team, the FAA is interested in applying the project’s mix of virtual and real-world testing to evaluate drone operations under increasing levels of operational complexity.

“This kind of mixed-reality type of operational complexity enables them to test drone operations in a way that was not possible before,” Sabet said.

Thanks to NASA’s support through USRC, the Cornell team will continue to expand their capabilities and manage increasingly complex advanced air mobility operations.

“Our goal is to build the foundational systems that enable safe, large-scale autonomy in the skies,” Sabet said.

USRC is an opportunity within NASA’s Transformative Aeronautics Concepts Program under the agency’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate.

About the Author

Jim Banke

Managing Editor/Senior Writer

Jim Banke is a veteran aviation and aerospace communicator with more than 40 years of experience as a writer, producer, consultant, and project manager based at Cape Canaveral, Florida. He is part of NASA Aeronautics' Strategic Communications Team and is Managing Editor for the Aeronautics topic on nasa.gov. In 2007 he was recognized with a Distinguished Public Service Medal, NASA's highest honor for a non-government employee.

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Over the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica, winds can whip around the globe relatively unimpeded by land. Intrepid sailors termed these southern latitudes the Roaring Forties, Furious Fifties, and Screaming Sixties on account of the strong prevailing winds.

When those winds encounter a barrier like an island, the disruption in airflow can be beautiful. One impediment, shown here, is remote Peter I Island. This ice-cloaked volcano lies at 68.86 degrees south latitude in the Bellingshausen Sea, some 400 kilometers (250 miles) off the coast of West Antarctica and more than 1,800 kilometers (1,100 miles) from Cape Horn, Chile.

On an austral summer day in 2026, the Landsat 8 satellite captured this image of von Kármán vortex streets downwind of the island. These counterrotating spirals form as flowing air is deflected, slows, and spins into eddies. A stiff, but perhaps not quite “screaming,” wind was likely blowing that day. Wind speeds typically need to be 18 to 54 kilometers (11 to 34 miles) per hour for vortices to form. With stronger gales, the eddies cannot maintain their shape. The following day, vortex streets appeared within a complex array of cloud types near the island.

Where the clouds parted around the island, some of its icy edifice became visible to the satellite. A 100-meter-wide circular crater sits at its summit, 1,640 meters (5,380 feet) above sea level. The Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program describes the island as a “shield-like volcano,” but there are no records of recent eruptions.

Scientific research on Peter I Island has been limited due to its remote location and the challenging ice conditions surrounding it. The island was discovered in 1821 by the Russian explorer Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and named for a tsar, but no one landed on it until 1929. The relatively few studies since have focused on geology, biodiversity, and the climate history recorded in its ice.

NASA surveyed the island during an Operation IceBridge campaign in 2011. This airborne science mission collected a suite of measurements over Earth’s polar ice in the period between the ICESat and ICESat-2 satellite missions to sustain the record of observations in these regions. While NASA’s DC-8 aircraft flew back to Chile from Antarctica, where teams spent the day measuring the Getz Ice Shelf and Thwaites Glacier from the air, the crew on board caught a rare glimpse (above) of the remote island.

NASA Earth Observatory image by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Photo courtesy of Christopher Shuman, UMBC (retired). Story by Lindsey Doermann.

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February 11, 2026

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References & Resources

• Jackson, M., et al. (2025) The Biodiversity of Peter I Island—The Most Remote Island in the World. Ecology and Evolution, 15(11), e71634.
• NASA Science, IceBridge. Accessed May 6, 2026.
• On Thin Ice (2011, November 4) The fragile fringe of West Antarctica. Accessed May 6, 2026.
• Smithsonian Institution Global Volcanism Program, Peter I Island. Accessed May 6, 2026.
• Thomas, E. R., et al. (2024) The first firn core from Peter I Island – capturing climate variability across the Bellingshausen Sea. Climate of the Past, 20(11), 2525–2538.

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NASA Ames Science Directorate Stars of the Month: May 2026

The NASA Ames Science Directorate recognizes the outstanding contributions of (pictured left to right) Lora Jovanović, Tammy Moore, Frances Donovan, and Jaden Ta. Their commitment to the NASA mission represents the entrepreneurial spirit, technical expertise, and collaborative disposition needed to explore this world and beyond.

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NASA advances aeronautics and space technologies through experimental aircraft and flight research at the agency’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California. Behind those efforts is the Dryden Aeronautical Test Range (DATR), which provides the communications, tracking, and data services that enable safe and effective missions.

For most NASA Armstrong research flights, the DATR supplies communications, radar, and telemetry. The range’s video capabilities can also capture ground footage as well as long-range coverage for flights. Modernization efforts started in the early 2020s expanded those capabilities and prepared the range to support efforts such as test flights of NASA’s X‑59 quiet supersonic research aircraft, as well as spaceflight communications.

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The range’s ability to processes and display real‑time radar, telemetry, and video data is critical for monitoring research flights, such as NASA’s Crossflow Attenuated Natural Laminar Flow (CATNLF) wing model. CATNLF, a scale-model wing attached under a NASA F-15B research jet, is designed to improve the smooth flow of air known as laminar flow, reducing drag and lowering fuel costs for future commercial aircraft.

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