ENAIRE has taken part in the Open Day of the European SPATIO project, held today in A Coruña, where innovative solutions for the safe and efficient management of drone traffic in European airspace were demonstrated under real operating conditions.
“Led by ENAIRE through its R&D subsidiary CRIDA, SPATIO is a three-year strategic initiative of the SESAR 3 Joint Undertaking (2023–2026) aimed at developing advanced U-space services to support the safe integration of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) into European airspace,” said the company in a press release.
“SPATIO has tackled one of the main challenges facing aviation today: how to safely manage a growing number of drones in complex and dynamic environments. Against this backdrop, the project has developed and validated advanced services for managing separation between unmanned aircraft, combining pre-flight planning with real-time control to prevent conflicts between drones. SPATIO has also developed advanced services to identify and mitigate the noise impact of drones, preventing noise levels from rising above what the public would regard as a nuisance. The project also makes it possible to identify areas where the risk of incidents over populated zones is higher, setting limits on aircraft density in those areas to ensure safety on the ground. With more than 20 European partners involved, the project has helped move towards a U-space airspace model capable of supporting high-density operations, contributing to the development of the European Digital Sky.”
During the Open Day, held at the experimental centre of the technology centre ITG, attendees were able to see the project’s results at first hand through technical presentations and live demonstrations throughout the day. Operators including ENAIRE, CRIDA and INECO then took part in a live demonstration of these capabilities in an environment involving multiple U-space service providers.
“One of the project’s most important milestones was the validation of tactical separation, successfully demonstrated in a real operating environment at Loring aerodrome (Madrid) last March,” said ENAIRE. “Organised by Indra together with ENAIRE, CRIDA, Ineco and other consortium partners, this validation made it possible to test these capabilities in complex operational scenarios, including the simultaneous management of different drone flights in an environment involving multiple U-space service providers (USSPs). The system developed analyses the aircrafts’ planned trajectories and predicts potential conflicts between drones in real time, generating alerts when separation minima are reached and providing automatic operational solutions. These instructions are integrated directly into each pilot’s control interface through dedicated software developed by INECO as part of the project.”
For more information
The project receives European funding under the SESAR programme through Grant Agreement No. 101114674, worth EUR 7 million.