A group of Cornell University students is getting attention from industry and the federal government for research aimed at a national air transportation management system that could let thousands of drones operate safely together.

NASA is backing the work through the University Student Research Challenge, which gives grants to college students working on the agency’s 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.”

Through the program, Sabet and her team are working on drone safety by managing drone movements in the air. NASA said the research supports advanced air mobility, which includes urban flying taxis, disaster response aircraft, and package delivery.

The work also reflects NASA’s focus on developing new technologies and supporting future workers through programs 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.

Right now, drone operators must file plans that fully describe the intended flight path of the drone with a traffic management service. Those plans are checked against others to prevent collisions, a process Sabet called strategic deconfliction.

Sabet said the current air traffic management system has limited ability to handle a growing number of aircraft, and that adding thousands of drones in coming years risks overburdening it.

She said the air needs something closer to the way roads work on the ground. Drivers know the path they expect to take, but they do not coordinate with every other driver before leaving. Instead, traffic laws and infrastructure such as stop lights and traffic signs let them deconflict as they go.

Drone operators would still file flight plans saying where they intend to go, but the idea is to build that kind of flexibility into drone operating systems so they can adapt during flight.

“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.

The Cornell team’s research focuses on integrating a simulated environment with the real one to test how drones can adapt to hazardous conditions and change their flight paths on their own.

The students said they could not fly 100 drones at once to test their ideas, so they created a virtual urban environment to evaluate 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.”

Because they were still limited in how many drones they could fly and where they could fly them, the team combined real and simulated testing.

“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.

The setup let the team test different traffic management tools and measure how drones might coordinate course corrections and avoid collisions.

Over the past year, the team has flown two real drones, each running the real-time simulation on board. That allowed them to coordinate and detect both simulated traffic and each other in the same 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.

NASA said the work drew notice from experts in Unmanned Aircraft Systems Traffic Management.

“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,” Koperdekar said.

Industry and the Federal Aviation Administration have also responded positively, according to the source material.

The team was asked to use its infrastructure and technology to virtually recreate an incident in 2025 in which two 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 fires in California to show how drones could better coordinate their movements to provide situational awareness for public safety officials on the ground and stay clear of fire-suppressing air tankers.

According to the Cornell team, the FAA is interested in using the project’s mix of virtual and real-world testing to evaluate drone operations as operational complexity increases.

“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.

NASA said the Cornell team will keep expanding its capabilities through USRC to 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 part of NASA’s Transformative Aeronautics Concepts Program under the agency’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate.

Read more from NASA.