Safety Challenges for Integrating U-Space in Urban Environments

As the drone market keeps growing, it is essential to build a regulatory and safety framework to ensure a safe, efficient and secure management of an increasing number of Remotely Piloted Aircraft System. In that sense, Europe launched U-space initiative to enable the integration of thousands of drones into the skies. However, Unmanned Aerial Systems technology and their framework need to reach highest level of maturity to face the safety challenges arising from their implementation. The objective of this paper is to assess the State-of-the-art of the U-space and Air Traffic Management regulatory framework in Europe, describe the main challenges that need to be addressed in order to ensure a safe and efficient integration of drones into the European airspace and finally, propose the next steps to define concrete actions and solutions to face the identified challenges. The analysis concludes that the current framework is not mature enough to address some of the emerging challenges identified, especially regarding the application of safety assessment methodologies in urban environments, where dense unmanned traffic and low-level operations generate a disruptive scenario. In order to face them, it is key to create safety metrics and operational insights using data from high-fidelity large-scale simulations followed by controlled flight demonstrations in sandbox environments. In addition, systems safety assessment methodologies should follow an iterative approach that assigns different assurance levels to each service depending on the criticality of their involvement in the operation. Future work should include the use of resilience engineering techniques to mitigate the risks linked to autonomous systems and a balanced usage of Artificial Intelligence, which benefits at medium/long term will overcome the initial safety challenges.