FlightAI - Flight plan artificial intelligence assistant

Drones in Europe are a rapidly developing sector with enterprises increasingly using drones for their business and the EU Legislator giving EASA rulemaking responsibility for civil drones of any mass. The common rules have been developed and will be enforced from January 2021. The performance of flight operations requires the compilation of a safety risk assessment document, in particular, the SORA (Specific Operations Risk Assessment) established for drone operations and endorsed by EASA. Compiling this assessment is expertise-intensive and time-consuming.

Currently, EUSC supports this operation with a web service called SAMWISE that, however, still requires the manual gathering of a large amount of information and the satisfaction of several constraints. The project aims to integrate into the web-solution built by EUSC the Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology generated by the FET-OPEN GOAL-Robots project, allowing the search of solutions in highly-nonlinear search spaces. The new technology from GOAL-Robots will support the semi-autonomous search of a solution to formulate flight plans based on an interactive interface, that meets the user’s requirements (flight start/arrival points, drone available, pilot licenses, etc.), the SORA requirements and the GIS characteristics of the involved overflown territory/airspace.

The project will accomplish a systematic validation of the integrated system by testing the acceptability and usability of the proposed technology by selected stakeholders through the wide stakeholder network of the consortium. Moreover, business case refinement and focused dissemination activities will pave the way to the commercialization of the produced service within the European drone market.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101034937, project ‘FlightAI - Flight plan artificial intelligence assistant’ 

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