Description

According to The Economist 110 000 drones were sold, worldwide, for commercial use in 2016 and expected to rise in the forthcoming years. According to Markets and Markets, the global drone market will reach 48.88 Billion $US by 2023. According to SESAR, the EU-Eurocontrol joint agency for the modernisation of ATM, as of 2017, the number of commercial drones in the EU was estimated to exceed 10 000. Their prediction for 2025 is about 200 000. From those, up to 10% will be devoted to delivery of goods, up to 20% to mapping and surveying and up to 25% to aerial imagery.

Stunning numbers, indeed. And managing some hundred thousand drones across the EU, for non-recreational activities, is a formidable task that requires new regulations, new ATM concepts, new services and related providers, new communication infrastructures, a reallocation of competences between the member states and the EU and, at least, an extension of the manned aircraft safe GNSS navigation methods to unmanned aircraft.

Working in these directions has direct social and economic impact in at least three major vectors: regulatory and standardization bodies, drone autopilot/navigation systems manufacturers, and general social acceptance of drones as a safe means of production.

Among the drone community, the leitmotif is clear: stand-alone GPS is insufficient for UAS safe and full-productive operations.

On one side, the mere lack of satellites in view is a degradation factor of current drone operations. The present/future GNSS panorama with multiple constellations in the air and and multiple frequencies available in the receiver will highly mitigate this problem.

But on the other side, what about navigation robustness? A quick overview of actual GPS histortical malfunctions (page 87) relates about the magnitude of non-detected GNSS errors. The rest -that is, how would a drone flying below 100 meters altitude above terrain would respond to these errors- is a story we all know and fear.

Good news is that GNSS integrity is available for free and for +99% of the drone autopilot receivers -and it is called EGNOS. Beyond the accuracy improvement by pseudo-range, orbit, clock and ionospheric corrections (Open Service), EGNOS is able to clean undesired GPS faults or, at least, warn us about it through scaling the confidence bounds in position determination and, ultimately, alert us about a faulty satellite (Safety-of-Life). This is what we call navigation integrity.

But is current EGNOS integrity performance compatible to drone requirements?

To address the previous matters, the project REALITY in vertebrated around a main goal: to promote the use of EGNOS for safe drone operations, in the short term and in the context of the EU drone operations vision, the U-Space.

To do that, four operational relevant scenarios will be addressed: maritime operations, fire-fighting support, package delivery and urban mapping. And additionally, intensive flights in a controlled scnearios will be carried out to properly characterize the contribution of EGNOS to an integrity concept for drones.