A NASA-sponsored working group is pushing forward efforts to make autonomous, multi-drone fleet operations a routine part of the national airspace, and it’s looking for new members to help.
The Routine Autonomous Multi-Aircraft Operations (RAM-AO) Working Group, formerly the m:N Working Group, meets March 3–5 at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. Aptima, Inc., under a NASA award, leads the effort, applying its expertise in human-autonomy teaming to facilitate the sessions.
Why Multi-Aircraft UAS Operations Are Complex
UAS applications — from cargo delivery and urban air taxis to disaster response and firefighting — increasingly demand that operators manage not just one drone, but many simultaneously. Scaling those operations safely into the national airspace requires solving a core challenge: how many aircraft can one human operator manage without hitting cognitive overload?
“We found through research that the ideal ratio of operators to aircraft is more complex than simply the number of unmanned aircraft to be managed,” said Dr. Samantha Emerson, Senior Scientist at Aptima and Principal Investigator for the NASA contract.
Emerson elaborated on that complexity: “To determine the true limits to safely scaling autonomous operations in the national airspace you have to consider the aviation ecosystem as a whole, from the density and activity of intervening air traffic to the size of the area the operator is monitoring, and the role the human plays in that overall picture.”
Research from the group’s July 2025 Langley meeting found that communication requirements, (not the raw number of drones), drive workload and performance changes most significantly.
Five Subgroups, Five Focus Areas for Multi-Aircraft UAS Operations
The March meeting will develop white papers across five active subgroups:
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Interventions & Exceptions: Builds modeling and simulation tools to validate m:N safety before FAA certification
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sUAS Regulatory Gaps: Identifies BVLOS policy shortfalls and briefs policymakers on emerging AAM technologies
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Scalable Remote Crew Design: Establishes best practices for task allocation and handoffs among remote crew members
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m:N Validation and Verification: Develops evaluation metrics for workload, performance, and safety
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System of Systems Design: Defines baseline management standards for fully integrated, non-segregated airspace
The U.S. Army’s Aviation and Missile Center also contributed perspectives on AI/ML integration, advocating a peer-to-peer human-agent operating model under the philosophy of “AI to do things right, so humans can do the right things.”
“We’re looking for new members from industry, academia, and other branches of government — both in the U.S. and globally — to contribute to these new subgroups,” Emerson said.
Interested parties can get involved using this form. The full report from the 2025 biannual meeting is available from NASA’s technical reports server. More information on NASA RAM-AO Working Group is available from their website. More information about Aptima, Inc., is available from their website.
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