Towards Safe Operations in Urban Environments with UAVs

The incorporation of uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAV) in urban environments is expanding with countless applications currently under development or even in prototype phase. The industry is facing many challenges, not only technological but also at the regulatory level, as flying in urban environments poses a significant challenge at the bureaucratic and regulatory levels. In this paper, we contribute to mitigating both challenges, showing, on the one hand, the process of obtaining permits to perform flights in a city and the publication of the data obtained with the sensors onboard the UAV for the benefit of the community. Also, to improve operations’ safety in urban environments, we propose an obstacle detection algorithm with the data obtained.