Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) are increasingly becoming a part of our day-to-day life and the wide range of their possible applications is creating a new industry with a large economic potential that is pushing the technological developments at a much faster pace than that for manned aviation.
The SESAR Outlook Study on RPAS clearly states the considerable economic benefit that can derive to EU industry from RPAS integration in civil airspace.
However, due to constraints arising from safety and operational considerations, RPAS can currently only fly in segregated airspace, making their integration in the civil airspace an unsolved challenge. RPAS have to guarantee a level of safety at least equal to that of manned aircraft. This requirement of an equivalent level of safety affects several critical RPA system elements and definitively the detect and avoid (DAA) systems.
In this respect, a large number of studies and projects have been carried out on the development of a Detect And Avoid System for RPAS, and relevant results have been achieved in support of the RPAS integration in airspace classes A-C, where the Air Traffic Control maintains the responsibility for the aircraft separation. Standards (Minimum Operational Performance Standards) have been issued, indeed, for the DAA system supporting RPAS operations under IFR rules in such airspace classes.
However, for a full integration of RPAS with General Air Traffic (GAT) (and possibly Operational Air Traffic (OAT)), an extended capability that performs Detect and Avoid is required. The most challenging environment for the design of this DAA system are operations in Class D-G airspaces. Such a DAA system enables the integration of RPAS in airspace where other aircraft may be flying under VFR or IFR, with a wide variety of equipment levels, with a wide range of aircraft performance, with or without a filed flight plan, flying with or without the ATS control and assistance.
The URCLEARED project aims at contributing to the definition of such a DAA system, and then at having an impact on the improvement of safety, efficiency and sustainability of the air transport system, and enabling remotely piloted flights in more complex scenarios.
In a longer perspective, the URCLEARED project has also the aim to help defining a detect and avoid system for the full exploitation of new concepts in air mobility, namely the On-Demand Mobility and the Urban Air Mobility concepts.
The figure below shows the functional architecture of a DAA system and identifies the RWC functions; the blocks in green highlight the specific functions on which the project will focus, which are: Surveillance data processing, Conflict Evaluation, RWC Decision Support, DAA display.
