Poseidon: A Low-Overhead Application for Ensuring Autonomous Drone Compliance with National Airspace Regulations

As autonomous flight systems rapidly evolve, they are increasingly expected to operate in complex, regulated environments. These regulations span multiple domains, including registration, insurance, flight restrictions, data collection, and communication. This research introduces Poseidon, an autonomous system designed to ensure compliance with local, national, and international law. By leveraging real-time positional data, flight parameters, and sensor range, Poseidon evaluates drone activity against imperative-based representations of laws for each affected region. Non-compliance is quantified and communicated to higher-level adaptive control systems for contextualized decision-making. An early prototype was evaluated using a series of North American test cases. Results indicate that Poseidon accurately determines operational rulesets, evaluates drone states, and recommends compliance adjustments at least 80 percent of the time. To our knowledge, this is one of the first solutions to autonomously maintain legal compliance in drone operations.