FEATURE AUTOMOTIVE ELECTRONICS
PROPELLING THE DRONE SECTOR DDS and drones: scalability, safety and security in the sky
Words by Chip Downing, senior market development director of aerospace and defense, RTI I
n June 2019, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) published a common set of European rules for drones: the Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2019/947. This publication defines new rules and regulations that control the free circulation of drones within Europe for business and leisure, while ensuring the safety and security of citizens. The overarching statement from
this regulation is “unmanned aircraft, irrespective of their mass, can operate within the same single European sky airspace, alongside manned aircraft, whether airplanes or helicopters.” This is a bold statement that requires a robust infrastructure of management. To create this infrastructure, the regulation breaks down drone operations into three categories: Open, Specific and Certified. Drone operations in the Open category do not require Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) platforms, and their operators, to conform to standard aeronautical compliance procedures. Operations in the Specific category cover operations presenting a higher risk, and therefore require a thorough risk assessment that defines which requirements are necessary to keep the operation safe.
Operations in the Certified category present the highest risk and are subject to the certification of the operator, the licensing of remote pilots, and the certification of the aircraft, similar to the strict and proven certification of today’s manned aircraft. With the release of these regulations, we can now focus on the toughest and highest value certification – the operation of drones in controlled airspace, and the use of drones to move people and deliver goods in highly populated areas – what I like to refer to as the Urban Canyon. The potential number of drones in these spaces will be big in scale, and will impose stress on city and aircraft systems.
14 SEPTEMBER 2019 | ELECTRONICS
These operations will require innovative approaches to integrate the proven expertise of manned aircraft certification, with the assimilation of artificial intelligence (AI) and massive sensor platforms to create safe and secure environments for mixing man and tomorrow’s machines.
Underpinning this technology are three fundamental challenges that need to be solved in order to vastly increase the utility of UAS platforms, in commercial operations, in the Urban Canyon: scalability, safety and security. To define these simply, a more robust infrastructure must be scalable, in order to accommodate the predicted increase in UAS participants: it must be a highly dynamic system that can readily adapt and grow. Safety standards must be adhered to and expanded, to account for unmanned systems in properly implemented UAS safety use cases. Finally, data security requirements should be obeyed, with end users providing data to confirm potential security threats. These challenges underscore that new and mission-critical autonomous applications require a proven, loosely coupled, standards-based, open communications platform to be the foundation of their success. On this note, a Data Distribution Service (DDS) is the proven standard that is widely used in distributed, unpredictable and mission-critical environments. It is
Chip Downing, senior market development director of aerospace and defense, RTI
particularly suited for dynamic, highly scalable, high security environments, such as drone operations, allowing for the creation of new peer-to-peer networks that provide efficient, real-time information exchange in a wide variety of use cases. The number one concern for expanding operations of new aircraft types is safety. This airborne software requires EUROCAE ED-12C compatibility, which has an outstanding record of safety and a rich ecosystem of service firms that can support any type of software certification. Commercial technology based on DDS takes this one step above the rest, with its commercial-off-the- shelf (COTS) certification evidence package that fully supports EUROCAE ED-12C DAL A, the highest criticality design assurance level for avionics software available.
In today’s highly-connected world, security is the toughest challenge to address. As we move from simple, single use case UAS operations, to highly networked, ever-changing and dynamic operations in densely populated areas, the competitive differentiator will be ever-vigilant, highly-adaptable security that defines commercial UAS value and utility. Creating a viable autonomous vehicle delivery system capable of transporting both people and packages across the globe through a safe, secure and reliable service will be a monumental effort, similar to the buildout of today’s commercial airline system that took decades. This infrastructure must be built upon trusted technological building blocks, to protect businesses and consumers that will depend upon its reliable, safe and secure operations for the expansion of their goods and services. For this, it’s time to turn to the trusted platform that has been proven in over 200 autonomous platforms: DDS.
RTI
www.rti.com / ELECTRONICS
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