Supporting drone mission planning and risk assessment with interactive representations of operational parameters

Drone missions in urban areas or at long range offer new opportunities for drone operators but require approval from the authorities due to the potential risks. Obtaining authorization is complex and time-consuming since operators must produce and often iterate on a concept of operation and risk analysis documents to accommodate the authorities’ expectations. Our goal is to support the drone mission planning process to make it more efficient so that more and safer operations can be designed and authorized. In this paper, we describe our work designing and assessing interactive representations of operational parameters on maps to enhance thinking and accelerate the process from early concept definition to mission execution. We first collaborated with an operator during a longitudinal study that enabled us to refine and explore our concepts and prototype with real-world use cases. We then collected the feedback from authorities to evaluate the ability of our prototype to match the needs and requirements beyond our first study. Our results indicate that visually representing the concept of operations makes its description more accurate and easier to understand. We also found that exploring the impact of the operational parameters on safety actively supports risk identification and the formulation of adequate mitigation. We believe that our work can inspire the design of future safety support systems and may also contribute to supporting the collaborative process between operators and authorities needed for drone operations in the Specific category.