Game of Drones How to Integrate safely RPAS in the airspace

Baptiste Tripard

Sales Manager

A sensor for every application

High-end RGB

12MP, raw,

shutter priority

Near-infrared

12MP, near

infrared

Red-edge

12MP, red-edge

Multispectral

4 bands

including

NIR & RE

ThermoMAP

thermal camera

Standard RGB

16MP

Applications

GIS / conservation

Hawaii

Damage assessment following a volcano eruption on Big Island

Race for Water project

Agriculture

Range of beneficial applications

• Water and nitrogen management

• Drainage tiles analysis

• Insurance claims

• Yield prediction

Mining / survey

Calculating volume extraction in Chile

• One of world’s largest open pits

• 3 km across, total depth 1,000 m

• 100,000 tons per day

• Lidar data collection problematic:

– Security risk (cliff top locations)

– Blind spot due to topography

• 10 GCPs set

• 6 x 30-min eBee flights

• 3D DTM created

• Volume measured

• Repeated 4 weeks later

“Our two-man team completed each

of its mapping sessions in a single day,

compared to seven using lidar” Eric Romersa, WSdata3D co-founder

What is the point in common?

Agriculture Mining / Survey GIS /

conservation

Cruise altitude < 150 m < 150 m < 150 m

Density of

population on

the ground

Very low Very low Low to dense

Frequency of

operations Daily to weekly Daily to weekly Daily to weekly

Flight authorizations

Regulations

Why regulations are necessary?

• Preserve safety and privacy

• Define liability principles

• Keep an equivalent level of safety (as manned aircrafts)

“The integration of RPAS will be

based on the principle that all

operations will have an equivalent

level of safety in comparison to

regular, manned, aviation.”

What does it concretely mean?

COMMUNICATION FROM THE COMMISSION TO THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND THE COUNCIL

The equivalent level of safety

• MIT proposed a method to

compute and compare level of

safety between manned and

unmanned.

• Ex.: Current aviation operations

impose a risk to the general public

on the order of 5x10-7 fatalities per

hour of operation.

• ELS: Estimated Level of Safety (nb of occurrences / flight hours)

• MTBF: Mean Time Before Failure (leading to an uncontrolled crash)

• Aexp: Area of exposure (depending

on aircraft size & shape)

• ρ: Population density

• PPen: Probability of penetration (depending on

vehicle energy)

Ex. Ground Impact Hazard Analysis

Setting desired level of safety allows to compute minimum MTBF for a

given aircraft, situation, etc.

How to minimize the ELS?

Golf ball Soccer Ball eBee Small UAS

Weight (g) 46 450 700 2 000

Kinetic

energy (J) 150 100 60 600

- Using ultra-light aircrafts

How to minimize the ELS?

Out of working area

Low Battery

GPS loss

Strong wind conditions

Radio link loss

AUTOPILOT

SAFETY eBee ELS = 5x10-9

- Automatic management of critical situations

Interesting results (example)

<0.9kg 0.9 to 14kg 14 to 450kg

Flight authorizations for the eBee

< 2 kg

United States

Italy

UK

Netherlands

Ireland Czech Republic

Sweden

Germany

Norway

Australia

Canada

France

Denmark

Switzerland

Conclusion

• The ELS framework allows to estimate:

how reliable a system needs to be, depending on

the use case

the practical impact of weight, speed, size,

population density, traffic density, etc.

• According to the EU Commission, ELS should be the

main principle underlying the rule making process and

there are methods to calculate it!

• Some countries have already opened their regulations

based on those criteria (< 2 kg in non-congested areas)