Project EARHEART

Drone operations are held back by their current regulatory environment. Operations are restricted to Visible Line of Sight (VLOS), which requires a local drone pilot on the ground to always maintain visibility of the drone, with additional ‘spotters’ located along the route of operation as a back-up should the operator lose visibility. This limits the scope of drone operations to a small geographic area, with the cost of an on-site drone pilot and spotters, and with a local radio-based (RF) communications system. This model does not scale, as extending coverage requires adding another drone pilot, spotters, and local control loop.

For drone operations to achieve scale and for their full value to be realised the ecosystem must move to Beyond Visible Line-of-Sight (BVLOS). Through achieving BVLOS and securing regulatory approval for such an approach the constraints preventing the scale operation and adoption of drone operations will be removed, and the sector would be ready for significant economic growth. To achieve this, regulators must be satisfied of the technological maturity & quality of aircraft; approve the use of a nationally-available radio communications system – in this project we propose using cellular/mobile – for use by drones; and approve the failsafe measures such as communications redundancy and autonomous flight for return-to-home/safe landing.

Alongside achieving regulatory approval for BVLOS the drone flight operating model also needs to evolve to take full advantage of BVLOS. This means moving ground control stations (GCS) from a local device tied to a specific drone, to a cloud GCS capable of mission control for many drones. This allows a shift from one pilot:one drone to one pilot:many drones, transforming the cost base & significantly increasing the addressable market for drone operations.

EARHEART will achieve all of these milestones: it will provide a quality assurance framework for aircraft; it will deliver a communications system based on cellular/mobile for drone control; it will build communications resilience through multilink (satcoms) and autonomous operations; and build a cloud-based GCS for scale-BVLOS operations. The presence of six drone manufacturers and operators from across Europe, as well as an End User in Network Rail, highlights the importance the sector is placing on the development of scale BVLOS operations as the future growth of the drone operations industry.