The emerging technology of drones is increasingly used to provide non-military aviation services (commercial, non-commercial or governmental non-military) and is expected to boost industrial competitiveness, promote entrepreneurship and create new businesses in order to generate growth. Drones are able to fly in areas or under conditions that are considered to be too dangerous, dull or dirty for manned aircraft, such as flying close to the ground/water. Furthermore, they comprise multiple systems with a great variety of equipment and payloads, making them suitable for a lot of different tasks. Examples of situations for which drones could be useful are coastguard search and rescue, mapping fires, police surveillance, or packet delivery. As such, there is a high demand for drone technologies resulting in additional jobs. Beyond the drone operators, manufacturers and system integrators, the drone industry also includes a broad supply chain providing a large range of enabling technologies.
Since not all key technologies required for drones to fly in non-segregated airspace are currently mature and standardised, drone integration into all types of airspace will be gradual and will evolve as technology, regulation and societal acceptance progress. For this reason, it is difficult to address all of the issues simultaneously, and the European Union (EU) RPAS roadmap provides a prioritised timeline for achieving full integration. The early focus should be on achieving integration with Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) operations in managed airspace, and therefore research in collision avoidance (detect and avoid, D&A) as well as command and control performance is also required. AIRPASS addresses the on-board technologies for drones that are required in order to implement the Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) concept for drone operations in very low level (VLL) conditions and within the visual flight rules (VFR) environment. The investigations will cover DAA systems for cooperative and non-cooperative traffic, autopilot systems as well as CNS systems. AIRPASS will recommend a low cost and open approach for the issue of VLL traffic management on-board systems.
The overall project objective is to examine of the range of technologies on-board the drone itself that are needed, or that need to be developed, in order to implement a UTM concept. The project objective can be viewed from different perspectives: From the societal perspective; objectives in terms of contribution to society in general. From the industrial perspective; objectives in terms of making valuable contribution to realize the ambition of the aerospace industry. From the research perspective; objectives in terms of the knowledge, tools, and capabilities that the consortium members, need to provide in order to be able to conduct the requested activities.
