From the space communication to the drone industry

Project Information

TRANSDAT

Grant agreement ID: 827563

DOI

10.3030/827563

Project closed

EC signature date 2 July 2018

Start date 1 August 2018

End date 31 December 2018

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Innovation In SMEs

Total cost

€ 71 429,00

EU contribution

€ 50 000,00

Coordinated by

DRONE SATELLITAL COMMUNICATIONS SL
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - TRANSDAT (From the space communication to the drone industry)

Reporting period: 2018-08-01 to 2018-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

During this phase 1 project, drone incidents in the EU have made obvious that every drone must be located in airspace for Air Traffic Control (ATC), authorities and to security forces. Indeed, in the future, every robot will need to be located. With the continuous increase in numbers of the drone market, golden opportunities are in hand for companies that decide to invest and operate in this niche. In this context, DRONESATCOM is developing a new method of satellite communications with UAVs, TRANSDAT, TSAT and SATIM, a plug & play capable to control every drone situated even BVLOS to provide location, secure connection, connectivity and air safety services with the highest quality standards, free from faults and interference
TRANSDAT project started in the year 2016 and today we have managed to take the antenna technology to a TRL 6 and the project software to a TRL 8. Nowadays we are currently testing it in a test bench and anechoic chamber and subsequently we shall take the antenna to test it in an operational environment in order to complete and qualify the systems.
As demonstrated above, our proposal has now a real, urgent demand in the state agencies. Therefore, the objective of TRANSDAT phase 2 will be to complete the design, prototyping and demonstration stages required to bring to bring our solutions for drones (TRANSDAT, TSAT and SATIM) to the market at international level.

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

We have defined the following objectives for our feasibility study and divided them in three aspects
TECHNICAL FEASIBILITY:
T1) To study potential costs reductions achievable by economies of scale in a process for large-scale
T2) To define the pathway, we anticipate compliance with the current and future regulations
T3) To analyse the main areas of improvement to achieve the highest performance of the antenna in different scenarios
COMMERCIAL FEASIBILITY
C1) To perform an in-depth market analysis of UAV sector to define geographical areas of interest and best companies to sell our product
C2) To define our market strategy for the commercialization of our product over the next 3 years, including a business model
FINANCIAL FEASIBILITY
F1) To refine the cost/price structure according to the potential costs reductions we can achieve by economies of scale
F2) Definition of the investment needs required to guarantee the technical and commercial success for our project
F3) To update our financial projections considering 3 possible scenarios: realistic, pessimistic and optimistic to assure the project success. Each scenario must contain the financial projections based on the number of units sold, unit price, operational cost, personnel, EBIDTA and ROI

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)

As we said above, the constant increase in numbers of this subset of the market makes big opportunities for individuals, companies and countries. It is our main target to consolidate the TRANSDAT system, allowing the drone market to continue growing and creating business opportunities in a thriving industrial sector without the necessity of the strict regulations and limitations that should be necessary if a vast number of uncontrolled UAVs flying were to start causing grave alterations in the air traffic. On the other hand, we successfully codified, got the core running and analysed test consumption, sign intensity and number of trials. In the Beta testing, our technology was proved by invited end users who examined our software functionality without any knowledge of internal implementation.

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