The project DELOREAN is about urban air mobility (UAM) and how the European Global Navigation Satellite Systems (EGNSS), composed of EGNOS and Galileo, are its enablers by guaranteeing safe navigation to UAM aircraft.

Urban air mobility (UAM) refers to urban transportation systems that move people by air. UAM includes both manned and unmanned aircraft and has been developed in response to ground traffic congestion. According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of the United States of America, UAM is a “system for air passenger and cargo transportation within an urban area, inclusive of small package delivery and other urban unmanned aircraft systems services.” A close definition is provided by the aviation company Honeywell as “an aviation industry term for on-demand and automated passenger or cargo-carrying air transportation services, typically flown without a pilot.” Taxi drones and delivery drones are particular cases of aircraft for UAM services. Urban air delivery (UAD) refers to drone delivery services in urban areas.

The goal of REALITY is 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. For this, REALITY will map non-recreational drone application-specific requirements into navigation performance and safety requirements –i.e., into accuracy, availability, continuity & integrity– and analyse to what extent EGNOS-based drone navigation systems meet them.

REALITY is motivated by the urgent need to respond, from an EGNSS perspective, to the challenge of safely integrating hundreds of thousands of non-recreational drones in EU airspace, flying at the so-called Very Low Level (VLL) altitude –500 ft above ground-, and at same time, by the challenge of fully leveraging current EGNOS (specifically, its integrity service) for the specific RPAS needs. As seen in preliminary studies [Molina-2012], civil aviation standards e.g. APV-I are clearly too conservative, non-protective for RPAS VLL operations, yet EGNOS has potential to be fully unleashed by adapting its integrity performance.

MultiTether aims at enhancing mapKITE, the total 3D mapping concept based on a tandem UAV-plus-car in which the UAV follow the car by a virtual (waypoint-based) tether, with the capability of including multiple aerial nodes (i.e. UAVs) that cooperate in-flight for corridor mapping missions. This project will therefore research and rehearse on a novel aerial mapping paradigm.

The goals of MultiTether are the following:

1. to build a demonstrator based on an extended mapKITE system i.e. double-UAV and a steering ground vehicle, to execute mission with different in-flight geometries for aerial image acquisition, depending on the particularities of the corridor segment being explored,
2. to proof such configuration as a valid option within the mapKITE paradigm, that is, assessing the ability to provide high-accuracy, total-point-of-view 3D geodata as in a regular mapKITE one,
3. to contribute to the RAWFIE ecosystem with a means to execute mapKITE-like operations (virtually tethered multiple UAVs), and
4. to promote the contribution of RAWFIE as a supporter of real-world mapping applications for UAVs.

HYCOS is an H2020 project funded by the NEPTUNE Accelerator project. Standing for "New Cross Sectoral Value Chains Creation across Europe Facilitated By Clusters for SMEs’ Innovation in Blue Growth", NEPTUNE supports the development of new cross-sectoral and cross-border industrial value-chains mixing Water, Aerospace, ICT and Agriculture technologies, through a direct support scheme to SMEs. NEPTUNE is an innovation action project supported by the European Commission and its HORIZON 2020 programme under the call for proposal INNOSUP-1-2015.

The goal of HYCOS is to establish a service for monitoring, accurately and frequently, the evolution of the coastline based on a cross-sectorial approach: the combination of free satellite imagery data with topographic LiDAR surveys with Mobile Mapping Systems (MMS) and drone-based aerial photogrammetry. These three mapping techniques are versatile (available satellites, MMS mounted on quad, and easy-to-operate drones) and together they enable surveys to be carried out at least twice a year in order to analyse physical phenomenon related to seasonal changes as well as the impacts of sporadic, high-intensity storms. The proposed multi-resolution imaging approach will produce accurate 3D geo-spatial data of the monitored coast, at a high resolution (drone imagery reaches millimetre-level ground resolution), high density (LiDAR reach around one million of measurements per second) and with large coverage (satellite imagery covers hundreds of kilometers of terrain footprint per image).