During the duration of the project, SAFEDRONE has performed the following main activities:
1. Design of the demonstration activities in detail that was the basis of the Demonstration Plan deliverable which has been one of the major deliverables of this first year. SAFEDRONE has organized the demonstrations in four trials,
2. A complete architecture of the system for SAFEDRONE project has been designed in order to implement the necessary U-space services and interfaces to perform the described Trials.
3. With respect to the integration of the general aviation aircraft and U-space, it is important to highlight that a new concept has been defined, called “cooperative but passive”.
4. Also, an operational risk analysis, as part of the safety studies needed to obtain the permit to flight in Spain, was performed in order to ensure that all the planned demonstrations can be performed in a safe way.
5. Unifly’s U-space systems has been adapted in order to fulfill SAFEDRONE requirements.
6. The GCS software of the drones has been modified in order to be able to communicate with U-space system from UNIFLY.
7. A number of adaptations on the general aviation aircraft has been performed which includes:
• Integration of an ADS-B out transponder.
• Development of a specific interface related to U-space services for the pilot.
8. With respect to the autonomous aerial vehicles, a set of advanced functionalities have been developed and tested based on a simulation framework. A detect and avoid method based on point clouds from different types of sensors (3D Lidar, stereo camera, time-of-flight camera,etc.) and the Lazy Theta* algorithm for path planning has been developed and tested.
9. A software architecture to handle swarming operations, such as coordinated monitoring missions, has been implemented, tested and integrated with the Unifly´s U-space system.
10. A number of drones or UAS has been adapted to the project requirements, including the configuration of the autopilot to be used by the project GCS.
11. It has been managed the flight authorizations to perform the flight experiments. Once the Demonstration Plan was approved by SESAR JU, it was decided (as a risk mitigation action for the project) to obtain the flight permits in order to be sure that the defined trials can be conducted in ATLAS Test Center.
12. A set of activities has been performed related to the design in detail of each of the flight experiments, and also, establish the methodology to verify the performance of the U-space system during the demonstration activities.
13. More than 100 flight experiments have been performed, obtaining a large number of interesting results that are detailed in the Demostration report deliverable.
14. Organization of a Demo Day with more than 70 attendants.
15. Creation of a project web-page and press-releases, and also, disseminate the project results in 9 different events.
16. Design of a pre-risk assessment applying SORA to the CONOPs of SAFEDRONE operations.
