Framework of key enabling technologies for safe and autonomous drones’ applications

Project Information

COMP4DRONES

Grant agreement ID: 826610

DOI

10.3030/826610

Project closed

EC signature date 20 May 2019

Start date 1 October 2019

End date 31 January 2023

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 29 461 259,83

EU contribution

€ 7 990 941,62

Coordinated by

INDRA SISTEMAS SA
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - COMP4DRONES (Framework of key enabling technologies for safe and autonomous drones’ applications)

Reporting period: 2021-08-01 to 2023-01-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Drones can perform air operations that manned aircrafts struggle with, and their use brings significant economic savings and environmental benefits whilst reducing the risk to human life. Drone-based service and product innovation, as driven by increased levels of connectivity and automation, is limited by the growing dependence on poorly interoperable proprietary technologies and the risks posed to people, to other vehicles and to property. The main goal of the COMP4DRONES project is to provide a framework of key enabling technologies for safe and autonomous drones. It brings to bear a holistically designed ecosystem from application to electronic components, realized as a tightly integrated multi-vendor and compositional UAV embedded architecture solution and a tool chain complementing the compositional architecture principles. The project focus on the following specific objectives: Ease the integration and customization of embedded drone systems. (O1), Enable drones to take safe autonomous decisions (O2), Ensure the deployment of trusted communications (O3), Minimize the design and verification effort for complex drone applications (O4), Ensure sustainable impact and creation of an industry-driven community (O5). COMP4DRONES build an open sustainable ecosystem around public, royalty-free and goal-driven software platform standards that will ease the development of new drone functionalities for multiple application domains on the fields of transport, inspection, logistic, precision agriculture, parcel delivery.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

COMP4DRONES studies the translation of best practices from aeronautics, automotive to ensure by design safe autonomous drones. Driven by u-space services, COMP4DRONES covers main technological enablers of UAS at different levels of the continuum from electronics to space sharing. By achieving objectives O2 and O3 of the project, the consortium has covered safe by design autonomous vehicles ensuring its secure integration in the airspace. COMP4DRONES has developed 74 technologies reaching high TRL, rising from electronic to fully cyber physical systems. COMP4DRONES initiates a reference architecture that enables the easy integration and the customization of drones systems. Following ontology oriented design, building blocks and design patterns for UAV are identified and defined. COMP4DRONES has also defined how to handle the instantiation of the reference architecture.
UAVs technology can only unlock its full potential when data acquisition and data analytics happen at the highest degree of automation. So, COMP4DRONES also addressed Edge computing and on-Cloud data analytics. Advanced sensing technology has been developed and implemented allowing to gather more realistic and better-quality data by means of more efficient data fusion algorithms and data processing capabilities. COMP4DRONES contributes towards enabling UAVs edge computing capabilities, thanks to embedded processing complementary to the cloud computing, ensuring IoT to Cloud continuum in the deployment of UAVs-based services and solutions.
The design and implementation of a set of enabling technologies (building blocks or generic HW/SW components) are documented in the Comp4Drones wiki (https://wiki.comp4drones.eu/) which is maintained beyond the project by RODENT network.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The main objective of COMP4DRONES was to develop a framework of key enabling technologies for safe an autonomous drones for civilian services, technologies that have been evaluated through 9 demonstrators. These demonstrations were carried out under representative reference industrial scenarios. C4D technologies have demonstrated how they can facilitate and enable a future largely deployment of drones applications, supporting the operations of drones at the time drone regulation is ongoing.
The project initiates a repository of 74 components that have been considered essential for easing a safe introduction and operation in real environments. Technologies that are linked with the objectives of: (O1) Easing the integration of embedded systems, (O2) facilitating drones to take autonomous decisions, (O3) to ensure trusted communications and (O4) to minimize the design and verification effort. Analysing the portfolio of component and technology it can be concluded that the project achieves relevant level of maturity, having more than half of the whole set reached a TRL5-TRL6 and almost the other half a TRL4. Seven of this components have a TRL3 due to that they are mostly developments at microelectronic level linked to hardware to support AI applications.
The COMP4DRONES project is not conceived as an isolated project, this is the reason why during the action it has collaborated with other initiatives such as ADACORSA, AW-DRONES, DRONE4SAFETY, RIMA, OPTICS2 and TRACE as well as an advisory board involving experts from the ecosystem (ENAC ITALY, NAVAL GROUP, ONERA, XUNTA OF GALICIA, INTA, etc).

COMP4DRONES ensures the sustainability of its collaborative ecosystem by setting-up the RODENT (European Drones Technologies Network) network. The main objective of RODEN networks is to promote, encourage, and assist for a coordinated development and deployment drone-based technology and services in Europe. The following specific objectives are identified:

1. Set up a virtual drone design platform promoting drone services based on European technologies.
2. Mapping of European “supply” skills
3. Increase cooperation between European Drone Industry
4. Enable more R&D activities
5. Build a competitive offer
6. Expand accessibility to European drone technologies
7. Increase the availability of drone technologies
8. Improve the interoperability of components and tools
9. Increase the qualification of engineers through training to acquire new practices

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