Ensuring transport safety and security is one of the EU’s main priorities, as it is spotlighted in WHITE PAPER–Roadmap to a Single European Transport Area, which sets out a comprehensive strategy leading to reach a safer, more efficient and sustainable civil road, rail, air and waterborne transport. However, even though some of the EU's main policies are aimed at making transport more sustainable -the European Commission has fixed the goal to reach zero fossil fuel emissions by 2050- safety must not be neglected, especially when focusing on road civil transport, which means the larger number of injuries and deaths.
With this aim, in 1993 the European Council adopted the decision of creating a Community database of road accidents, the CARE project (Community database on Accidents on the Roads in Europe). According to the latest data from EC, road traffic accidents in the Member States of the EU claim about 25,100 lives in 2018. Despite this gradual decrease in both the number of accidents and the number of road deaths experienced during last decades (a decrease of 21% respect from 2010), a stabilization around the current trend can be observed (a reduction of 1% compared with 2017) that is making unreachable the EU-goal of 15,750 deaths by 2020 2.
Regarding to other means of transport, although maritime (6,812 injuries and 683 fatalities in 2011-20173) and aerial (1,054 injuries in 2014-20184) do not represent as many consequences as the road one in EU, maintaining a high level of safety implies high costs and efforts in monitoring, surveillance and maintenance of vehicles (vessels, aircrafts) and infrastructures (airports, seaports…). Facts such as the presence of birds on runways (bird strikes with airplanes is a relatively common issue in airports), the incursion of external drones (or UAVs) in airports facilities (which have already provoke temporally closures) or needed inspections of the condition of ships, involve high costs and time, reduce efficiency and question the safety of these means of transport in terms of public opinion.
To face this situation, the emergence of drone technologies has been identified as a potential efficient way to implement solutions capable of improving the safety and efficiency of the civil transport for both people and goods, thanks to the ability of the latest devices to carry out fast inspection, surveillance operations, loading of small goods, their high accessibility for hard-to-reach areas or their ability to collect and transmit information such as images or videos in real time, combined with an enhance in telecommunications, remote guidance technologies, and the increase in the loading capacity and energetic autonomy of these vehicles.
the main objective of the project is to create and validate new swarm drone applications to enhance safety, security and efficiency in the civil system transport, through the research and development of drone swarming 4D (3 spatial dimensions + time) path-planning algorithms -for implementation in Ground Control Stations- and new U-space services (drone swarm deconfliction and flight planning) supporting drone swarms auto-guidance.
