Fraunhofer FHR
A radar system has been developed to improve the safety of vertiports ahead of the introduction of vertical take-off aircraft such as drones, multirotors and air taxis.
Collectively known as electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, they are already used in civil protection, by fire services and for bridge inspections. But in July, visitors at the 2024 Olympic Games will be able to fly to venues using air taxis for the first time. Retail firms such as Amazon are also planning to start using drones for deliveries as early as this year in the UK.
The aircraft will take off from and land on pads known as vertiports, which will often be located in dense, urban areas surrounded by obstacles including large buildings and other aircraft.
Air travel companies are planning to equip Olympic venues with eVTOL landing systems to transport visitors from the airport to events.
Initially, the drone systems will be piloted by a human with one passenger per taxi, but the coming years could see them being piloted autonomously.
Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for High Frequency Physics and Radar Techniques (Fraunhofer FHR) are developing a digital sensor network, including a radar sensor, that in the future will be able to closely monitor air traffic at a vertiport and ensure safe flight operations.
Active and passive sensors will be deployed for autonomous usage and will be able to link to each other to map the airspace around the port in real time. The network can also be expanded or reduced to accommodate the size of each vertiport.
Oliver Biallawons, a scientist at Fraunhofer FHR, said: “The nodes are fully digital, and each sensor in the network functions entirely autonomously. The sensors aren’t coordinated by a central computer unit; they network themselves.
“They are able to independently localise and organise themselves. Based on the principle of edge computing, each sensor has its own computer unit and can detect the location of other sensors in the network.”
The job of sending and receiving is shared between the individual sensors, which coordinate with each other. The decentralised active and passive sensors are installed on the ground and work together to sense the entire take-off and landing pad, as well as the airspace above it.
The network then decides which sensor to operate in active (sending and receiving) and passive (receiving only) mode as required. The more sensors in the network, the greater the area that can be monitored. Even if a sensor or radar node is added or removed, the network can continue to function. The individual nodes are connected wirelessly through the radar signal.
The radar network, which the researchers have named the Civil Drone Systems (CDS) Network, can also detect eVTOLs that don’t have a communication device such as a chip or tag. With the addition of AI, the safety solution can detect obstacles that block incoming or outgoing flight paths and classify them as different objects such as trees, birds and drones. The radar network can even recognise the size of a drone and how many rotors it has.
The system currently exists as a demonstrator, but has not yet been miniaturised for real-world use.
Last week, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) launched a consultation into integrating vertiports at existing aerodromes in the UK.
