Despite the huge potential of drones to disrupt the global economic, civil and social landscape due to their better endurance, range, safety and cost efficiency over manned aircraft, their full deployment is hindered by restrictive air traffic regulations and misfit air traffic management systems, not designed for the new use case of autonomous drones. OneSky is a multi-award winning Swiss company with a mission to safely and efficiently open the sky to all flying objects. OneSky builds the infrastructure allowing tomorrow’s drone revolution, ensuring their safe integration into today’s aviation world. We offer an online platform, which gathers data from a network of scaled-down control towers collecting maximum of information on the position of every flying object in the sky, manned or unmanned. Our technology will allow virtually everybody to see the air traffic surrounding them and take the most appropriate measures. Thus, what OneSky brings to the aviation world is intelligent air traffic instruments and automatic collision avoidance tools, enabling low-risk flight plans and avoidance strategies and creating a safer smarter sky for all. This will unlock the full potential of drones across many sectors such as Infrastructure, agriculture, mining, surveying, film and industry as well as disaster management among other sectors. OneSkyConnect will facilitate the opening up of lower airspace for drone operation unlocking their full potential which will in turn result in massive economic, environmental and social benefits. Professional drone users lose on average €25k per year per drone because of current restrictions. OneSkyConnect will result in the lifting of these restrictions and opening up of the lower airspace for a multitude of drone applications. The use of drones will reduce complexity, optimise costs and create new business opportunities for the operators unlocking a business potential of €120 billion by 2020.

The SAFIR-Med project’s vision is to achieve safe, sustainable, socially accepted and socially beneficial urban air mobility. SAFIR-Med represents all value chain actors and stakeholder as either project partner (ATC, USPs, Operators, UAS Manufacturers, cities) or formal associate partner (major customers, technology & service providers) at a representative international level. Five unmanned UAV platforms (passenger eVTOL, Hydrogen fuel cell VTOL, AED medical drone, X8 medical transport) will be combined with manned aviation in real life exercises validating technology in real urban environment. Technologies of all partners will be leveraged to make use of the maximum number of U-Space services towards the highest possible operational safety level, including advanced Detect And Avoid U-space service. The demonstrations will take place in the cities of Antwerp (BE), Aachen (DE) and Heerlen (NL), leveraging the MAHHL trans-border region, following a full de-risking exercise at the DronePort BVLOS test-facility in Sint-Truiden, Belgium. The demonstration results will be further virtually enhanced through large-scale simulations in order to test the maximum airspace capacity of the CONOPS. The project results will then further be validated and made representable for the whole of the EU, by simulating demonstrations in two additional locations in Europe, namely Athens, Greece (South EU) and Prague, Czech Republic (East EU). Lessons learnt will be documented in a Performance Assessment and recommendations report, providing refinements to the current U-space architecture principles and creating measurable indicators for UAM which will enable Smart Cities to include UAM in their Transport Roadmaps, support standardisation and thereby safety. Finally, SAFIR-Med will have made an important contribution to the EU healthcare system, by ensuring that future generations will continue to democratically have access to the best cure and care.

5G!Drones aim is to trial several UAV use-cases covering eMBB, URLLC, and mMTC 5G services, and to validate 5G KPIs for supporting such challenging use-cases. The project will drive the UAV verticals and 5G networks to a win-win position, on one hand by showing that 5G is able to guarantee UAV vertical KPIs, and on the other hand by demonstrating that 5G can support challenging use-cases that put pressure on network resources, such as low-latency and reliable communication, massive number of connections and high bandwidth requirements, simultaneously. 5G!Drones will build on top of the 5G facilities provided by the ICT-17 projects and a number of support sites, while identifying and developing the missing components to trial UAV use-cases. The project will feature Network Slicing as the key component to simultaneously run the three types of UAV services on the same 5G infrastructure (including the RAN, back/fronthaul, Core), demonstrating that each UAV application runs independently and does not affect the performance of other UAV applications, while covering different 5G services. While considering verticals will be the main users of 5G!Drones, the project will build a software layer to automate the run of trials that exposes a high level API to request the execution of a trial according to the scenario defined by the vertical, while enforcing the trial’s scenario using the API exposed by the 5G facility, as well as the 5G!Drones enablers API deployed at the facility. Thus, 5G!Drones will enable abstracting all the low-level details to run the trials for a vertical and aims at validating 5G KPIs to support several UAV use-cases via trials using a 5G shared infrastructure, showing that 5G supports the performance requirements of UAVs with several simultaneous UAV applications with different characteristics (eMBB, uRLLC and mMTC). Using the obtained results, 5G!Drones will allow the UAV association to make recommendations for further improvements on 5G.