SAFEDRONE: H2020 European Commission project. The scope is to acquire practical experience in Very Low Level (VLL) operations where general aviation, state aviation and optionally piloted aircrafts and drones will share the airspace. Practical focus demonstrating activities with flight tests.
The main results of SAFEDRONE were published in this paper. Video of experiment here.
The task of MAGNA in this project is to control the multi-drone mission and serve as an API to the U-Space provider, called Unifly in this case.
The use case consists of three UAVs under the control of the same operator. The task is sweeping a global area subdivided into three subareas of the same size. For that purpose, the operator initially defines the global area in the external, private Unifly application. That global area is written into the autopilot, from where it is read by MAGNA.
A new tool inside the spatial information management of MAGNA is developed to divide the global area into three subareas of the same size. Each area is then filled with a zig-zag sweeping path and assigned to each UAV. MAGNA independently request for approval each path for each drone. Once a successful response is received for all of them, MAGNA deploys its known architecture to accomplish the whole coordinated mission. During the whole mission, the common operator can follow the state of the mission in the Unifly application as well as in the MAGNA control and visualisation tools.