The ASTRAEA Annual Conference 2011 held in London on 7th September again attracted a large number of representatives from the UAS (Unmanned Aircraft Systems) industry.

ASTRAEA is a £62m jointly funded industry/government initiative which aim is to enable the routine use of UAS in all classes of airspace without the need for restrictive or specialised conditions of operation. The conference provided an ideal opportunity to describe developments within research into UAS technologies and regulation to make them more accessible to the commercial market.

It was refreshing to see presentations from potential civilian UAS users describing the positive aspects of using UAS within the geographic survey and environmental domains. For example David Blake of the British Antarctic Survey spoke on the use and potential of UAS for research at the South Pole, where BAS already used an electric UAV for winter research into the polar sea-ice

Updates on the regulatory requirements reinforced the concept that UAS will be treated like any other airspace user and as such, need to prove to regulators that they are safe and can operate in an equivalent way to manned flight. Gp Capt John Clark of the UK CAA reminded the conference that UAS must work within the existing regulatory framework and ‘whatever you propose, it must be safe’. Central to this requirement is that UAS should be capable of ‘seeing’ and ‘avoiding’ other airspace users – just as for manned aircraft. ASTRAEA is developing technical solutions to prove the ‘sense and avoid’ capabilities needed to enable UAS operations in non-segregated airspace. This raises interesting questions about how equivalence of such systems can be proven and how, for example, you can successfully prove equivalence to a human in detecting other airspace users.

It is clear that UAS development, including programmes such as ASTRAEA, is still driven predominately by large industry. To date larger UAS have supported military-type applications which tend to require larger air vehicles with a higher payload capacity. This supports the carriage of remote monitoring and control equipment and UAS autonomy that would not be possible on smaller platforms. There is already demand from civilian operators for much smaller and cheaper UAS. However, until the technical developments and certification programmes being tested and trialled within programmes such as ASTRAEA are able to filter down to smaller UAS, the mass market penetration that has been forecast will likely be delayed.

The challenges remain and it will be interesting to see what comes next.

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