NASA-Funded Cornell 'Project Orion' Develops V2V Tactical Deconfliction Technology to Advance Autonomous Airspace Collaboration

By Mehrnaz Sabet

A NASA-funded research initiative led by Cornell University is building the infrastructure and services required for next-generation autonomous collaborative airspace operations. The project combines drone-to-drone tactical coordination mechanisms with a real-time hybrid test environment capable of replicating dense, dynamic, and safety-critical operational scenarios.

Core Mission: Bridging the Gap Between Flight Planning and Collision Avoidance

Project Orion addresses a central challenge in future UAS Traffic Management (UTM): how to move beyond high-level flight planning and single-aircraft collision avoidance toward an airspace system that enables autonomous drones to tactically coordinate, respond to unexpected situations, and undergo rigorous real-world stress testing before operational deployment.

In application scenarios involving dense Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations, logistics delivery, public safety, and Advanced Air Mobility (AAM), an intermediate tactical layer is needed—one that allows aircraft to exchange flight intent, perform local sequencing, resolve conflicts, and recover from disruptions in real time.

V2V-Based Tactical Deconfliction Services

One of Project Orion's core research directions is the development of tactical deconfliction services based on Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) coordination. The project team is collaborating with Qualcomm to test an early prototype of aerial V2V communications for drones, exploring how autonomous aircraft can directly exchange information to support coordinated low-altitude operations.

This technology is designed to operate at the layer between pre-flight strategic planning and last-resort collision avoidance. At this level, drones can share short-term flight intent, local state, situational awareness data, and event-driven coordination messages—helping aircraft maintain safe and efficient movement through shared airspace.

This capability becomes especially important when conditions change faster than strategic planning can respond to—including sudden congestion, route closures, communication degradation, emergency traffic, mission priority changes, or unexpected obstacles. Project Orion treats V2V coordination as a tactical service layer rather than simple situational broadcasting, encompassing intent exchange, local sequencing, conflict resolution, and safe degradation before conflicts escalate into emergencies.

Real-Time Validation Infrastructure for Complex Drone Operations

Project Orion is simultaneously developing real-time validation infrastructure for autonomous drone operations.

The platform integrates simulation, field testing, V2V communications, and Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) validation. Physical drones flying at open test sites can interact in real time with a simulated city-scale airspace environment containing virtual aircraft, buildings, obstacles, operational constraints, emergency scenarios, and communication degradation conditions.

This creates a hybrid environment in which operational complexity can be verified through actual flight. Physical drones can simulate dense urban conditions within a controlled site setting, allowing researchers and operators to test scenarios that would be difficult to reproduce, prohibitively expensive, or unsafe in public airspace.

The project's goal is to close the gap between offline simulation and real-world deployment. While offline simulation is suitable for large-scale evaluation, it cannot fully replicate the interactions between real hardware, onboard autonomous systems, communication links, timing effects, and real-time operational decisions. Conventional field testing, meanwhile, is constrained by the number of aircraft that can be safely flown and the complexity of scenarios that can be reliably reproduced.

By integrating real aircraft, simulated traffic, environmental complexity, communication effects, and operational disruptions into a single real-time environment, Project Orion can assess how autonomous and coordinated systems perform under genuine stress—before large-scale deployment.

Building a Credible Evidence Base for Future UTM and AAM

A foundational premise of Project Orion is that future UTM and AAM systems require credible empirical evidence before autonomous capabilities can scale. The critical question is not only whether a single aircraft can complete a single mission, but whether large numbers of aircraft and operators—potentially using different autonomous technology architectures—can safely share airspace under realistic operational complexity.

To date, the project has completed more than 231,000 simulation runs, approximately 120.5 million executed flight trajectories, and 15,695 hours of experimentation examining high-traffic UTM and mixed airspace operations.

A recently published technical report, Tactical Separation Provision in High-Volume UTM: Evidence, Requirements, and Communications Architecture for Mixed Airspace, represents one of Project Orion's major outputs, with additional publications and technical deliverables planned for release.

Project Orion's validation infrastructure has also been used to reproduce and stress-test a range of operational scenarios, including logistics delivery, dense airspace interactions, simulated incident conditions, wildfire monitoring, and emergency response missions. These scenarios help evaluate the behavior of autonomous systems, communications, and tactical deconfliction services under conditions that are difficult to replicate through conventional field testing.

Toward an Autonomously Collaborative Airspace

The long-term vision behind Project Orion is to establish an airspace system in which drones are no longer isolated aircraft following static plans, but active participants in a collaborative operational environment. In such an environment, strategic services, tactical coordination, vehicle autonomy systems, communications infrastructure, and validation frameworks must all work in concert.

The project pursues this vision on two simultaneous fronts: tactical services that enable drones to coordinate in real time, and infrastructure that can test those services under realistic and repeatable conditions.

As low-altitude operations grow increasingly dense and diverse, Project Orion aims to help future UTM systems do more than track where drones plan to fly—supporting how those drones adapt in real time as their operational environment evolves.

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Mehrnaz Sabet is the Principal Investigator and Technical Lead of Project Orion.

Further Information:

• Project Orion official website: https://www.projectorion.info/
• Technical report: https://doi.org/10.7298/1c7q-nq81

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