Airborne data collection on resilient system architectures

Project Information

ADACORSA

Grant agreement ID: 876019

DOI

10.3030/876019

Project closed

EC signature date 19 May 2020

Start date 1 May 2020

End date 31 October 2023

Funded under

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

Total cost

€ 41 399 555,42

EU contribution

€ 11 869 482,47

Coordinated by

INFINEON TECHNOLOGIES AG
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - ADACORSA (Airborne data collection on resilient system architectures)

Reporting period: 2022-05-01 to 2023-10-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

ADACORSA is a project to develop sensor and communication technologies for drones to give drones the chance being safe and efficient “elements” for observation, analysis, or transport in an extended out of line-of-sight operation range. The strategic aim is to:
• Helping unlock potential in long-range and BVLOS drone operations
• Contributing to higher public and regulatory acceptance of drone use
o More robust and reliable technologies through functional redundancy
o Better sensors via fusion and more reliable communications via integration of data links
• Further strengthen the integration of automotive and drone industry
o World-class sensors from automotive industry
o Commercial off-the-shelf data communication technologies and services
o Design for automotive-style efficient production of components and subsystems

In order to keep the leading competitive strength, and to respond to the global challenge, the ECSEL-JU project ADACORSA has gathered Europe’s leading semiconductor companies, suppliers, and research institutes to create a pan-European eco-system, which has the critical mass to initiate standards and to provide relevant sensors, components, architectures and subsystems for a completely new type of drones.
ADACORSA is a large and complex R&D project with the following key characteristics of the project are:
• 49 Partners from 12 EU countries
• Around 41 Mio Euro total budget and 12 Mio of funding
• 8 work packages and 10 supply chains
• 77 deliverables
• Research and innovation action with different Technology Readiness Levels (TRL 2 to 5)

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

The third project year, as well as the six-month extension, was characterized by final technical developments as well as the testing, validation and verification and finally the build up and testing of the final demonstrators. Given the large consortium and the manifold of technical objectives and views, during the third year an excessive amount of communication was needed. This includes the organization and moderation of meetings for verification and validation as well as special demonstrator planning meetings and technical workshops.
Finally, the active work packages are currently perfectly in line with the plan and could catch up the bad start 2020, shown by all of our final results.
We have managed the integration of the single components, hardware and software modules into the single supply chain demonstrators and bringing all into operation.

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)

ADACORSA is a JU project addressing key technologies for Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) drone operations in 7 objectives.

O1 – Low-weight, low-power, high- performance components for airborne observation and detection
Main achievements:
• Significant improvements to the radar sensor: Double the radar frequency at double the transmit and the receive channels & High frequency, low noise DCDC power supply for radar sensors
• High resolution (640x480) 3D imaging sensor with the use of neural networks: Simulation framework for radar, LiDAR and 3D imager, modulation scheme to improve dynamic range and neural networks to improve distance estimates at long range while reducing power requirements
• Flying drone with multiple perception sensors: Radar, LiDAR and 3D imaging, sensor fusion and Detection of pedestrians

O2 – Low-weight, low-power, high-reliability systems for on-board data analytics
Main achievements:
• New semantic front end optimized for cylinder identification
• Optimized toolbox for design space exploration for SLAM back end design
• Artificial Neural Network power-efficient designs on FPGAs
• Optimized parallelized implementation of FastSLAM 2.0 exploiting GPU features targeting NVIDIA Jetson Nano
• Spiking neural network model for real-time pattern recognition on complex sensor data, and a hardware emulated prototype to validate the model prior to silicon development

O3 – Secure and reliable communication and identification of airspace users
Main achievements:
• QoS prediction of 4G/5G networks in airborne situations and QoS flight path planning – Market: Not available on the market
• Multi-link communication architecture – Market: New compared to existing solutions
• Next-gen eSIM/eUICC 32-bit security controller with focus on mobile 5G/6G networks – Market: Higher chip and feature integration (e.g. smaller NVM-flash technology) with an autonomously reaction on security threats
• “IoT SAFE“ Java Applet Firmware running on nextgen eSIM/eUICC controller for secure TLS communication
• Phased array antenna system – Market: Antenna system based on a patented feed network, able to selectively activate subsets of the radiating elements of the array with variable phases
• Drone ID: By using mobile phone profiles – Market: No worldwide usable system available
• Operator ID: Increases the security of the operator’s login to his user terminal while improving usability – Market: This technology is now also being introduced by Microsoft, Google, Amazon in their webservices
• Wireless Security and Safety Layer (WSSL)
• Blockchain-based PKI and TM for open networks of drones – Market: Not available on the market

O4 – Resilient architecture for airborne systems
Main achievements:
• deployment of sensor fusion algorithms for autonomous drone navigation
• Safety and security principles of a modular architecture
• flight management unit (enables to register drones, flights, drone operators and pilots), distributed battery management, Internal Communication Gateway with redundant networking
• Fail-operational distributed data processing and communication architecture based on point-to-point communication was demonstrated during the Authority control hand-over

O5 – Demonstration Of long-range BVLOS operations
Main achievements:
• Low speed automated driving technology with perception, planning and control algorithms applied for heavy commercial vehicles for operations in mining areas
• Precise automated excavation of soil (operation below 20cm accuracy and within appropriate time limits)
• TRL 5 Proven authority handover of control over a small UA potentially increasing the range of BVLOS logistics
• TRL 5 Automatic channel switching with SATCOM integration
• TRL-4 UDP-based multilink gateway with routing between drone and ground
• TRL 4 low SWaP DAA Cooperative DAA-system to avoid (manned) aircraft

O6 – Strengthen European drone industry
Main achievements:
• Carried out accurate market and competition analysis, highlighting the impact of the ADACORSA advancements on the EU drone market
• Published the findings on market analysis and potential of drone technologies
The SC 9 has finally strengthened the EU drone industry, through advanced user acceptance models, accurate market analysis, and solid adoption roadmap of the ADACORSA technologies.

O7 – Public and regulatory acceptance
- Regarding the main achievements and in comparison, to the market, it has to be said, that SORA is currently the most established regulatory framework to obtain permissions to fly drones in BVLOS conditions, called specific operations. This includes detailed Acceptable Means of Compliance (AMCs) up to Specific Assurance and Integrity Level (SAIL) IV.

All KPIs could be fulfilled perfectly as planned.

ADACORSA in a nutshell

SC and Demonstrators