Certifying Emergency Landing for Safe Urban UAV

TL;DR

This paper proposes a safety certification approach for urban UAVs by integrating emergency landing techniques and runtime monitoring to mitigate risks in densely populated areas.

Contribution

It introduces new requirements and an implementation for emergency landing systems, enhancing safety certification processes for urban UAV operations.

Findings

The runtime monitor can effectively detect errors in the emergency landing system.

Preliminary results show the feasibility of integrating EL with safety certification.

The approach addresses gaps in current standards like SORA for urban UAV safety.

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have the potential to be used for many applications in urban environments. However, allowing UAVs to fly above densely populated areas raises concerns regarding safety. One of the main safety issues is the possibility for a failure to cause the loss of navigation capabilities, which can result in the UAV falling/landing in hazardous areas such as busy roads, where it can cause fatal accidents. Current standards, such as the SORA published in 2019, do not consider applicable mitigation techniques to handle this kind of hazardous situations. Consequently, certifying UAV urban operations implies to demonstrate very high levels of integrity, which results in prohibitive development costs. To address this issue, this paper explores the concept of Emergency Landing (EL). A safety analysis is conducted on an urban UAV case study, and requirements are proposed to enable the integration of EL as an acceptable mitigation mean in the SORA. Based on these requirements, an EL implementation was developed, together with a runtime monitoring architecture to enhance confidence in the system. Preliminary qualitative results are presented and the monitor seem to be able to detect errors of the EL system effectively.