AERTEC Solutions announces the award of an important contract to assess the safe autonomous flight termination of Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS), in consortium with GMV. This project called SAFETERM is sponsored by the European Defence Agency (EDA) and has an initial six months definition phase.
The aim of this project is to assess the different technological and certification approaches to RPAS autonomy.
Operating in non-segreagated airspace is an important need of military RPAS for both training and operational purposes, and EDA is one of the major European stakeholder in this domain.
Autonomy is a technical enabler for RPAS airspace integration, particularly for emergency situations in which the intervention of the Remote Pilot is no longer possible.
The aim of SAFETERM is to assess the different technological and certification approaches to autonomy to ensure a predictable yet adaptive aircraft behavior in case of emergency leading to a Flight Termination. In particular SAFETERM will focus on emergencies involving multiple failures including C2 datalink loss, i.e. without Remote Pilot’s intervention.
Notwithstanding the potential use of this capability on a wide range of RPAS, the target platform will be fixed wing large tactical or Medium Altitude Long Endurance (MALE)-type RPAS with a Maximum Take Off Weight (MTOW) larger than 500 Kg operating fully integrated into the European Air Traffic Management System (ATM).
This functionality is expected to use autonomous control algorithms as well as heavy use of machine learning techniques to detect, classify and model the environment required for the autonomous flying of a large RPAS.
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