A Spanish SME is offering its expertise on autopilots and drone components for Horizon Europe topics

Summary

A Spanish leading company in the drone sector is offering its expertise in autopilots and related services for drones, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and electric vertical take-off and landing aircrafts (eVTOLs), to be integrated in a consortia applying to different Horizon Europe topics (mainly clusters 3, 5 and 6) . A research cooperation agreement with SMEs, corporates, universities or research centres in envisaged.

Description

The SME based in Spain provides more than 15 years’ experience in drones and professional components for autonomous vehicles. The SME has developed its own autopilot and related components and nowadays this company is exporting its products and services to more than 70 countries. The Spanish SME also delivers complete full electric drone systems for specific applications and provides support with the installation and customization.

The core product of the Spanish company is the Autopilot. It is a high reliability control system for drones and eVTOLs developed under international standards. This system is available as a single core module or including 4x redundancy. Besides the certification and reliability, the autopilot includes plenty of features that can help the partners in achieving their research goals. With its experience the Spanish SME can help the partners with any issue related to the autonomous sector.

The autopilot can be easily configured to manage all kinds of manned or unmanned vehicles. It allows the user to modify almost all the parameters and configurations to adapt the system to his needs without modifying the source code of the autopilot. This technology can be offered together with a documentation data pack available for remotely piloted aircrafts systems (RPAS), UAVs, drone certification and valid also for the system safety assessment (SSA).

This technology can be offered with onsite advanced engineering services in order to help the partner with the integration of the autopilot system on his platform, and train his staff on how to operate and control the drone with the autopilot.

The SME has identified the following topics in Horizon Europe in which they could provide its expertise and become a valuable partner for a consortium:

HORIZON-CL3-2022-DRS-01-08: Enhanced situational awareness and preparedness of first responders and improved capacities to minimise time-to-react in urban areas in the case of CBRN-E-related events
HORIZON-CL5-2021-D4-01-02: Industrialisation of deep renovation workflows for energy-efficient buildings
HORIZON-CL5-2021-D6-01-13: Safe automation and human factors in aviation – intelligent integration and assistance
HORIZON-CL5-2022-D6-01-07: More resilient aircraft and increased survivability
HORIZON-CL5-2022-D6-02-05: Advanced multimodal network and traffic management for seamless door-to-door mobility of passengers and freight transport
HORIZON-CL6-2021-GOVERNANCE-01-21: Potential of drones as multi-purpose vehicle – risks and added values
HORIZON-CL6-2022-BIODIV-01-01: Observing and mapping biodiversity and ecosystems, with particular focus on coastal and marine ecosystems
HORIZON-CL6-2021-COMMUNITIES-01-03: Smart XG, last-mile and edge solutions for remote farming, forestry and rural areas

The Spanish company was a partner in various kinds of research and development projects, one of them is an autonomous parafoil development for the experimentation in Earth’s atmosphere of research technologies to be used in space programs. The project aim is to develop infrastructures to support research and testing for new technologies to be used in space programs.

The spanish SME offers 15 years of experience in autonomous vehicles in the following sectors:
● Military.
● Urban Air Mobility.
● Research and development.
● Mapping.
● Agriculture.
● Certification process.

The SME has ample experience in European, American, Asian and Middle Eastren projects.

The Spanish company is offering these products and services under a research cooperation agreement to help drones manufacturers and related companies to get the best performance out of their projects.

Advantages & innovations

Safety, innovation and constant improvement are one of the fundamental pillars at the Spanish SME. With 15-years experience and a team working with the autopilot, the company is committed with the need to develop high-reliability UAVs, UGVs (unmanned ground vehicles) and USV (unmanned surface vessels) systems capable of operating in critical areas and capable of operating in a variety of roles. The Spanish company can help the partners with all the certification process, as the drones will be flying in critical areas such as airports, having a certification compliant autopilot is therefore a big step forward in the UAV certification process of a complete autonomous aircraft. The use of a critical subsystem that complies with all regulations involves a huge investment in terms of time and personal and material resources for development. Acquiring an autopilot that previously complies with the certification standards ensures that all development plans, designs, processes, and other records such as configuration management, change control and records, etc. and requirement management and verification are in line with regulations. The main features that can improve the performance of the partner’s drones are: ● Highly configurable: the system is fully configurable; even the user interface layout can be user defined. ● Custom routines: User selectable automatic actions, activated upon a system event or periodically. ● Communications: Embedded line of sight radio and 4G communications and compatibility with satcom modules. ● Safety: Redundancy, sensing and avoidance based on radar, LIDAR (light detection and ranging) or transponder. ● Performance: Dual global navigation system satellite and inertial measurement unit (GNSS & IMU) including real-time kinematic (RTK) positioning and curve-based navigation. ● Fully Automatic: Define events (speed, altitude, waypoint…) to trigger automatic actions (go home, payload activation…).

Stage of development

Already on the market

Contact/ source: Enterprise Europe Network (europa.eu)