Airport Surveillance with Drones for Improved Flight Safety – UAS VISION

Future airports will be more and more automated and remotely controlled, and drones are expected to be integrated with daily operations. A newly granted project ASAS – Airport Surveillance for Airport Safety, led by RISE Research Institutes of Sweden and to be conducted together with LFV (Luftfartsverket), Swedish Regional Airports (SRF), Örnsköldsvik Airport (OER) and FlyPulse will develop and demonstrate drone solutions to help automate daily operations in airports. With multiple stakeholders from authorities, airports, and related professional domains, the project will identify use cases that address the needs of daily operations at airports, develop and demonstrate drone solutions that help automate the airport operations, improve the airport safety, optimize the resource utilization, and reduce the environmental impacts. As the first in the world and one big step towards automated airports, LFV introduced Remote Tower Center (RTC) in 2015 with which the traffic control for the OER airport was taken over by Sundsvall/Midlanda airport (SDL) through remote control. Again in 2017, connected vehicles were introduced for improving airport safety based on results from the project DRIWS – Digital Runway Incursion Warning Systems, where physical stop-lights were replaced by digital signals within the vehicles for preventing ground vehicles from approaching the runway without clearance from air traffic control (ATC).