Some important questions were raised at the second edition of “Rendez-vous Aéro de l’Innovation” last week at ISAE-Supaero. What does the future hold for drones? How are they used in different contexts? How can UAV technology progress? How do we ensure the safe insertion of drones into the airspace? Are drones safe ?
Many actors of the UAV, ATM and aeronautical industries brought their take on the overbearing question: how to ensure a reliable, safe, and intelligent development? And sparked many discussions.
Pascual Campoy, professor at Politecnica in Madrid explored the different applications of drones and image processing to the farming industry, and described innovative projects he has been working on. According to the professor, the next important step is to find an efficient method to increase endurance and to develop technologies for drone swarming, and rather than representing danger, drones represent safety: the safe execution of dangerous tasks for humans such as, reaching difficult places.
This point of view was shared by industrials, including, Nicolas Pollet from Altametris who uses drones to inspect railway lines and collect data for post-processing. The use of drones enables the company to collect data more efficiently than methods that are heavily dependant on humans, but also to access secluded areas.
Henri Seydoux, CEO and founder of Parrot brought his point of view to the day; since his company has been on the market, producing and selling drones, they’ve never had serious security issues. The technology used, be it hardware or software, is not dangerous however, the people behind the drones may be. As for the solution, he suggested that simply controlling the technology should be the answer!
The DGAC takes the question of introducing drones safely, very seriously, U-Space program was launched by the DSNA to define the services to provide and the procedures to implement in order to allow drone operators safe and secure integration into the airspace. A lot of work is yet to be done to reach the objective of an automated, interconnected, digital European U-Space in 2025 however, as a starting point there are rules and regulations that should be respected, including restrictions and procedures to request authorizations.
U-Space is an exciting program, we look forward to participating in this project to develop the French UTM and airspace to integrate drones safely, with our UTM product. During the event we were able to show our complete UTM solution, HOLOGUIDE, our aim is to provide a single platform for drone operators and authorities to digitalize and simplify the registration and authorization requests as well as providing operators with a planning tool and authorities improved situational awareness.
The day finished off with questions and discussions on solutions to protect sensitive sites and events against malicious drones. Jean-Philippe Percheron from Groupe ADP revealed the objective to protect the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris with HOLOGARDE. We’re proud to be part of the developments of the counter UAV solution, with our C2 where data fusion and classification enable us to detect, track and identify malicious drones.
