Research database

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones are nowadays used for countless applications such as good delivery, smart agriculture, search and rescue, monitoring, and so on. In these applications, though, drones can be actually employed only if there is a pilot in the Visual Line of Sight (VLoS). This aspect heavily constrains the operativity of the UAVs, limiting their effectiveness while employed in the aforementioned applications. In order to unlock the full potentiality of these flying devices, UAVs should automatically and autonomously perform flights Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLoS). Currently, also due to the lack of rules, drones cannot regularly fly BVLoS yet, and the main reason is that “safety” and “UAV control” are two big concerns not addressed yet. The safety analyzes the consequences for the ground people if any kind of malfunctioning hits the UAVs, while the UAV control is required in order to constantly command and control the mission at any time. Hence, with the objective to enable the BVLoS for UAVs, we aim to address these two concerns. In this project, we will start assessing the possible risks by combining the onboard UAV sensors and the available ground maps (e.g., population density, terrain), in order to create a proper risk awareness, and to guide the drones in safer paths with respect to the application prerequisites. We will also investigate how to realize a reliable UAV control, letting the UAVs and the ground base be continuously and seamlessly connected. Since it would not be sustainable nor feasible to build a new communication infrastructure for BVLoS, we will leverage on the available ground cellular infrastructure used by billions of devices (plus the satellite one) to ensure a suitable connectivity, although there are some required application parameters to guarantee, like bandwidth, or latency. So, risk awareness and connectivity are two enabling technologies that will be studied here for allowing BVLoS flights. In this project, we propose to plan BVLoS UAVs flights by focusing on a few key missions as follows: i) suburban missions: UAVs are used for collecting images/data or for performing aerial work such as spraying on agriculture or monitoring corridors like rivers, electricity, and gas pipelines; and ii) urban missions: UAVs are used for structural health monitoring of buildings, traffic monitoring, food/beverage, small parcel mail, or biomedical goods delivery. In suburban missions, we will i) analyze the link quality and constraints offered by the cellular networks; ii) analyze the risk of UAVs; and iii) propose routing algorithms that consider both connectivity and risk assessment processes. In urban missions, we will i) optimize the Quality of Service (QoS) of the communications; ii) evaluate the security and safety robustness; and iii) devise advanced UAV routing and scheduling algorithms extended also to multiple UAVs.