The drone flight market in Europe is experiencing rapid growth as businesses envisages possible uses of drones for various purposes. To support this market expansion, the EU Legislator is establishing legal rules for drone operations, categorized into three risk levels, each with specific administrative procedures proportional to the associated risk. Most commercial applications, such as pipeline and power-line inspection, media and entertainment, traffic monitoring, last mile freight delivery, and precision agriculture, are likely to fall into the medium risk category known as "specific" operations. Conducting these specific operations typically requires submitting a safety risk assessment. For this purpose, EASA recommends the use of the Specific Operations Risk Assessment (SORA), a newly developed methodology specifically designed for drone operations. SORA was created by the Joint Authorities for Rulemaking on Unmanned Systems (JARUS) and provides a comprehensive risk assessment process, ensuring the identification and implementation of safety requirements for safe drone operations.
The project's main goal was to address the need for expertise and the time-consuming activities for compiling a SORA report to obtain drone flight authorizations. Completing a SORA risk assessment demands extensive knowledge in Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) operations and a significant amount of information from multiple sources, including airspace and ground area characteristics, population density, critical infrastructure presence, specifications of the used drone, intended operation details, operator capability, and personnel competence. Manual information collection can be time-consuming, often causing delays when operators need to quickly respond to client inquiries about the feasibility of specific services. This issue is particularly challenging for non-aviation professionals, who comprise the majority of drone operators.
At the beginning of the project, EuroUSC-Italia, a partner of the consortium, provided a web-based solution called SAMWISE (www.online-sora.com) to assist UAS operators in developing SORA analyses for planned drone flights. However, this solution requires expert users to manually gather and input a substantial amount of information. Additionally, there no feedback is given to suggest alternative solutions if the operator is unable to meet the identified requirements at the end of the SORA analysis.
Therefore, the project set out to achieve the following objectives: (1) Integrate an AI search algorithm from a previous EU FET OPEN project into the current SAMWISE system; the resulting product, called 'FlightAI', willl aid humans in constructing possible drone flight plans based on user-defined via points, while reducing the risks assessed with SORA. (2) Test the commercial potential of the FlightAI product based on a validation assessment involving relevant stakeholders, and gather indications from them to determine the market's viability; (3) Carry out communication and dissemination activities to reach potentially interested stakeholders and prepare an effective marketing strategy for the FlightAI product.
