Project Orion tests infrastructure for autonomous drone fleets
Project Orion is advancing a mixed-reality system to test and coordinate autonomous drone fleets safely. The platform, developed at Cornell and led by information science doctoral student Mehrnaz Sabet, targets a central barrier for unmanned aviation: proving that drones can operate around people, buildings, crewed aircraft and one another before they scale into routine public use.
The system combines real-time simulation, field testing, vehicle-to-vehicle communication and hardware-in-the-loop validation. Physical drones can fly in an open test field while interacting with a simulated city-scale airspace containing virtual aircraft, buildings, obstacles, emergency conditions and degraded communications. That setup lets researchers run scenarios that would be unsafe, costly or difficult to reproduce directly in public airspace.
Project Orion has received support from NASA and the National Science Foundation, and has drawn engagement from the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Qualcomm Technologies and commercial drone operators. NIST licensed the underlying simulation technology this year for public-safety drone research, while the Orion team is working with Qualcomm on an early prototype for airborne vehicle-to-vehicle communication between drones. NASA also seeded Sabet and Project Orion with $80,000 in 2024 through its University Student Research Challenge under the Transformative Aeronautics Concepts Program.
The platform has also been used to reconstruct real-world drone incidents. After a delivery drone collided with a construction crane in Arizona in 2025, researchers recreated the site inside Orion’s validation environment to examine how similar hazards could be detected, communicated and safely tested before deployment. The team is extending the same infrastructure to public-safety missions such as wildfire monitoring and emergency response, where multiple drones may need to operate near crewed aircraft, shifting hazards and limited communications coverage.
The work comes as drones are being positioned for package delivery, bridge and skyscraper inspection, emergency monitoring and, eventually, passenger transport. Those operations will require evidence that autonomy, communications and safety systems can function together under realistic stress. Project Orion points to a testing model for future air traffic management, giving regulators, researchers and operators a way to validate drone fleets before they become common in busy skies.