Deconfliction of small and medium scale UAVs comes down to data-link capability. Loading such an aircraft down with all the sensors required to detect and avoid other aircraft is simply not cost effective. However, given a reliable data link, each aircraft can report it’s own position to a central ATC facility and receive warnings about potential hazards at the same time. However, even sending these updates once a second can be a huge amount of data with enough aircraft in the sky. The DoD estimates the needed data throughput at 20 Gbps for a fleet of some 700 drones. While this data rate itself is not insurmountable, when you consider that it must be reliable and available over a large geographic area, the situation becomes more complicated. While this estimate includes the video and control feeds, it does give an idea of the order of magnitude of bandwidth needed. By that I mean that a military drone has a much higher need for an HD video feed for target designation and surveillance reasons than a standard civilian cargo UAV would need (Milsat, 2012).
Once the use of data links helps UAVs avoid each other, then each individual aircraft can worry about avoiding other obstacles, such as birds. The difficulty of this task decreases rapidly with increasing altitude. Also, most of these obstacles move relatively slow when compared to aircraft, providing a slightly longer timescale to detect and avoid them.
References:
Furstenberg, D. (2012, March 1). Intel: Meeting The Growing Bandwidth Demands Of A Modern Military. Retrieved November 13, 2014, from http://www.milsatmagazine.com/story.php?number=855426811
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