Application No.
19/551,620
Filed
VerSky Protocol
Altitude-Direction Encoding Protocol for Air Traffic Management with Hexagonal Grid and Intersection Separation
- Confirmation
- 6812
- Claims
- 20
- Entity
- Micro
Patent filed · 27 February 2026
An air traffic protocol for drones, eVTOLs, and the next 50 years of low-altitude flight.
VerSky is an open protocol for low-altitude airspace. It encodes direction in altitude using a hexagonal grid — solving conflict resolution that classical ATC was never designed for.
Protocol Specification
Principles:7
AACP Layers:5
Operating Modes:4
Compliance Levels:5
Spec Version:v0.1-alpha
Initialising airspace…
↻ AUTO-ORBIT · PROTOCOL VISUALIZATION (CONCEPT)
How It Works
Three steps. One round-trip.
From flight intent to conflict resolution — entirely peer-to-peer with a cryptographically auditable trail.
01
Plan
Drone declares intent: route, altitude band, ETA. VerSky reserves a 4D space-time slot in the hex grid.
POST /reserve { route, altitude: 140, etaMs: 1200 }02
Fly
Drone broadcasts position + altitude continuously. Other vehicles subscribe and see the same airspace.
BROADCAST { id, lat, lng, alt: 140, dir: SE }03
Resolve
At intersections, drones negotiate P2P. Failure to agree triggers deterministic fallback. All decisions logged.
NEGOTIATE peer:0x4f3a → fallback: deterministic yieldUSPTO Filing Status
Two non-provisional applications. One protocol stack.
Both applications were filed on February 27, 2026 as Pro Se with Micro Entity status. Priority dates are locked.
Application No.
19/551,624
Filed
AACP
AI Aerial Communication Protocol with Peer-to-Peer Negotiation and Deterministic Fallback Resolution
- Confirmation
- 4598
- Claims
- 20
- Entity
- Micro
0+
Hex Direction Bands
per altitude layer
0m
Design Ceiling
low-altitude airspace
0
Patent Claims
across two applications
0%
Open Protocol
Reference implementation forthcoming
Find Your Path
Four publics. Four paths. One protocol.
VerSky is being shaped by four distinct audiences. Pick the one closest to your situation — each path has its own page, its own primary sources, and its own way of getting in touch.
Don't fit any of these? Open a general thread →
Three Pillars
Why this protocol, and why now.
ICAO's rules were written for jets at flight levels. Below 500 metres, airspace will look more like a city street grid than a runway.
P1 · §3-§5
Altitude Encodes Direction
A hexagonal grid gives 6+ discrete heading bands per altitude layer. Aircraft at any altitude know which way they should be travelling — without negotiation.
P2 · Layer 2
P2P + AI Negotiation
Where altitude alone isn't enough — at intersections — vehicles negotiate peer-to-peer. If consensus fails, deterministic fallback rules resolve the conflict.
P2 · Layers 4 + 5
Open + Auditable
Every AI decision is logged in a tamper-evident hash chain. Trust scoring layer deters Sybil attacks. Audit trail designed for independent verification.
Different from Classical ATC
Built for vehicles classical air traffic control was never designed for.
ICAO's 1950s semicircular rule assumes pilots, voice radio, and fuel reserves. Below 500 metres, none of those assumptions hold.
Classical ATC
VerSky Protocol
Designed For
Manned aircraft above flight levels
Unmanned aircraft below 500m
Conflict Resolution
Centralised ATC voice instructions
Peer-to-peer protocol negotiation
Direction Encoding
2 directions (East / West semicircular)
6+ directions per altitude band
Capacity
Linear corridors, manual reservation
Hexagonal cells with declared capacity
AI Decision Audit
Voice transcripts (manual review)
Hash-chained logs (court-admissible)
Failure Behaviour
Hold pattern (assumes fuel reserve)
Deterministic descent (assumes battery)
Six Scenarios
What this protocol is actually solving.
Concrete situations the protocol is designed for. Each one is a place where classical air traffic management breaks down at the densities the next decade requires.
Throughput
Asymmetric traffic surge
A 500-vehicle delivery fleet enters a 2 km² urban corridor at peak hour. Classical ATC sequences arrivals one-by-one. VerSky's hex cells absorb the wave: each cell holds up to 8 vehicles per floor, and the six directional sub-layers let opposing flows pass through the same intersection at different altitudes — simultaneously, without negotiation.
Multi-floor
Inter-fleet convergence
A delivery drone at the Light Cargo floor and a passenger eVTOL at the Passenger floor occupy the same hex cell at the same moment. Different vehicle classes, different floors, different speed envelopes. The 4D reservation primitive treats them as independent — no coordination overhead.
Priority
Emergency override
A medical eVTOL needs a corridor. Priority by Purpose (Emergency > Passenger > Cargo > Commercial > Recreation) cascades through every vehicle the medical vehicle approaches. The deterministic fallback resolver guarantees identical yield decisions across the affected fleet — no central authority required.
Graceful degradation
Communication blackout
Cellular drops. ATM goes dark. Vehicles in the affected sector transition Full → Degraded → Peer-Only → Standalone without losing safety. AACP layers 1–2 keep negotiating where signal exists; deterministic fallback handles the rest.
Interoperability
Mixed compliance airspace
A regulator runs a pilot corridor with a mixed fleet: some vehicles at Basic compliance (broadcast only), some at Full (all five AACP layers). The capability discovery layer lets each vehicle adapt to its counterpart — no rip-and-replace required during rollout.
Auditability
Standards-body audit
An aviation authority needs to reconstruct what happened during an incident. The hash-chained decision log makes each AI choice attributable, time-ordered, and tamper-evident. Court-admissible by design — not bolted on afterwards.
Roadmap
Four years from filing to standard.
We're building this for adoption — which means publishing early, shipping reference code, and engaging standards bodies on their own timetable.
Phase 1·2026 Q1–Q2Active
Patents Filed · Whitepaper
USPTO non-provisional applications filed. Public whitepaper, reference architecture, this site.
▸
Phase 2·2026 Q3–Q4
Reference Implementation
Open source SDK (Python, C++). GitHub repo. Documentation site. Early academic partners.
3
Phase 3·2027
VerSky Cloud
REST/WebSocket telemetry ingestion. Hash-chained logs for accident investigation. Free + commercial tiers.
4
Phase 4·2027–2028
Standards Body Engagement
Submission to ASTM F38, ICAO RPAS Panel, EUROCAE WG-105. Industry pilots with drone OEMs.
5
Phase 5·2028–2030
Regulatory Adoption
Aviation authority dashboards. Mandatory compliance for commercial drone fleets. Global rollout.
From the Author
“The hardest part of an open protocol isn't the protocol — it's the patience to publish it before the standards body asks for it.”
VerSky was filed Pro Se with USPTO by a single inventor. The choice to file as Pro Se wasn't a constraint; it was the point. If the protocol can be authored and prosecuted by one careful inventor, it can be adopted by anyone.
— Jittapol Prukpatarakul, Bangkok · February 2026