Project description
Air traffic controllers for drones
Drone technologies are increasingly presented as a potential efficient way to improve the safety and efficiency of civil transport. Nevertheless, so far, security issues have made it impossible to fly drones at low altitudes in most civil environments, since technologies related to drone guidance and remote control have not reached the required readiness level. To ensure airspace safety, a traffic management system for drones is essential. The EU-funded LABYRINTH project will study centralised planification systems capable of communicating with drones operating in certain areas and compute paths to avoid collisions. The project will create a U-space-based technology to meet the needs of autonomous drone applications. This technology will be deployed in different civil scenarios such as roads, seaports, and airports.
Objective
Ensuring transport safety and security is one of the EU’s main priorities, as spotlighted in WHITE PAPER–Roadmap to a Single European Transport Area, which sets out a strategy leading to reach a safer, more efficient and more sustainable civil road, rail, air and waterborne transport. Drone applications are considered as potentially capable of revolutionizing the world around us. Nevertheless, security issues make impossible to fly drones in most situations, due to drone guidance and control-related technologies have not reached enough readiness level to guarantee safe operations in most of low altitude scenarios.
To face these issues, SESAR has created U-SPACE, a new framework designed to integrate safely, securely and efficiently drone operations at low level into EU airspace. Active geofencing is one of the main drone emerging technologies outlined in the U-Space Blueprint. However, although geofencing is a useful technology to avoid drones presence in restricted places, it is not prepared to face the future proliferation of drones in areas such as cities, where drone swarm applications will lead to an increasing risk of collisions.
LABYRINTH has identified the need to research on centralized planification systems capable of communicating with the drones in a certain area, processing their desired origin and destination points and compute paths to avoid collisions. This is embodied in the Unmanned Traffic Management Systems (UTM) that, in contrast to EU strategy, are one of the NASA’s main research priorities, whose objective is to create flight control centres for auto-piloted drones.
Aligned with this, LABYRINTH aims to use this new approach to create a U-SPACE-based technology to make a leap forward in the efforts undertaken so far through the development of autonomous drone applications, focussing on solutions adressed to enhace safety and efficiency of civil trasnport in road, seaport and airport scenarios, including emergency assistance operations.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
28903 Getafe (Madrid)
Spain