COMP4DRONES: Framework of key enabling technologies for safe and autonomous drones’ applications

Description of the Project

COMP4DRONES is an ECSEL JU project coordinated by Indra that brings together a consortium of 50 partners with the aim of providing a framework of key enabling technologies for safe and autonomous drones. In particular,

COMP4DRONES will leverage composability and modularity for customizable and trusted autonomous drones for civilian services. The project takes into account recent regulation developments in this area from EASA. The project will also consider the SESAR-JU studies concerning civilian drones, and will adhere to the U-space approach and protocols when available.

COMP4DRONES will also build an open sustainable ecosystem around public, royalty-free and goal-driven software platform standards that will ease the development of new drone functionalities for multiple application domains. Lead applications driving ecosystem development and benchmarking on the fields of transport, construction, logistics, inspection, surveillance, and agriculture will be developed.

Industrial Partners

Indra's Role

Indra is the Project Coordinator of COMP4DRONES, managing a consortium of 50 partners. Indra is in charge of the use case and the two demonstrators that will be carried out for transportation management. The objective is to apply the use of drones to improve the efficiency and automation of monitoring activities, as well as to lower their costs, upgrade the control and maintenance of transportation operations and their infrastructure, offering greater flexibility and stability in solutions and services.

Moreover, drones can help reduce incident response times and operational risks, increase the capacity of cargo areas in ports and other infrastructure, and increase safety and sustainability. Prointec (Indra) is also participating in the construction use case working on the digitalization of the construction process of road and tunnel infrastructures using drones and BIM models.

Universities and Technology centres

Technologies used

Indra will use drones as sensors for current transportation monitoring systems, and integrate them into Mova Traffic, its solutions for transportation control and management. It will develop image and video processing tools based on graphics cards as well as artificial intelligence and deep learning technologies to analyze video and images taken by the drones, so that incidents can be automatically detected.

During the project, Indra will integrate the Mova Traffic transportation management solutions, which include Air Drones, the unmanned aircraft system traffic management (UTM) in low-altitude airspace.

Additionally, in order to ensure the secure exchange of information between the transportation control center and the drones, Indra will develop communication modules using 4G technology, which will guarantee cybersecurity, reliability and stability, creating encrypted communication channels for drone applications.

In addition, it will improve its Mantis fixed-wing drone, developing a civil use version for innovative transportation applications. Among other improvements, Indra will work on the detection capabilities of Mantis, in order to facilitate both the processing and the analysis of the images and videos obtained.

More information

This project, with reference nº H2020-826610-2, has been funded by the European Commission in the call H2020-ECSEL-2018-2-RIA-two-stage