The project CLASS revolves around 5 main actions.
First of all, CLASS will define to how drones will be operated in the European sky. This is part of the Concept of Operations, shortened into CONOPS. As such, CLASS is strongly connected to all relevant stakeholders, not only from the drone community but from the air traffic management (ATM) community and the civil aviation authorities as well. The French School of Civil Aviation, ENAC, is in charge of maintaining the link between CLASS and the drone and ATM community. ENAC organised the first CLASS worskhop which aimed at gathering the requirements from the stakeholders. This workshop lead to the definition of 6 designed scenarios and key performance indicators (KPIs). These KPIs will help the CLASS partners to assess the efficiency and relevancy of the CLASS services in the frame of the U-space concept. CLASS is a part of the SESAR community . As such, CLASS gets inspiration from the latest updates of the ATM Master Plan. Finally, CLASS partners collaborate with other SESAR projects, mainly with the project CORUS which aims to define the European CONOPS.
Second, CLASS partners set up the systems to perform drone tracking. Airbus has in-house technology primarily devoted to the IoT business to drone tracking. This technology was adapted to create Drone-it!, the Drone Identifier and Tracker. Considering the defined scenarios, architecture and requirements have been proposed to track cooperative drones in the frame of live experiments. Aveillant optimised and trained the Gamekeeper, a holographic radar which can detect and track small drones. The CLASS scenarios were successfully flown with the ENAC's drones at the Aveillant facilites at Deenethorpe, UK. These flights created valuable data that were recorded for the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) to tune the data fusion algorithm, which has been selected among several candidates.
Third, Unifly worked on the definition of the real-time air situation display and proposed an architecture that is able to cope with highly demanding requirements in terms of latency, real-time messaging and scalability. Unifly started to implement the interfaces between the Gamekeeper, Drone-it! and the real time display. Then, Airbus teams investigated deconfliction by adapting available algorithms from manned aviation. The traffic simulator and the conflict detection have been tuned to drone characteristics.
Fourth, a demonstrator, based on a drone simulator, has been deemed necessary to build to more easily enable the assessment of KPIs than field measurements.
Finally, the CLASS partners disseminate actions and results, not only towards the manned and unmanned communities (via events such as the World ATM Congress, Paris Air Show, ICAO) but also to the general public (webpage and press releases)
