The Drone Standards Info Portal: Helping the European Industry Navigate Standards for Drone Operations

The AW-Drones project, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, was started to help mitigate the problems that a lack of clear standards pose for drone companies.

“The user-friendly Info Portal will allow drones operators and stakeholders to easily identify the standards that they need to safely perform UAS operations in the “specific” category and, in particular, when flying Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLoS),” says a press release.

Regulation (EU) 2019/947 requires a safety risk assessment based on the SORA methodology – for which AW-Drones has identified more than 600 available industry standards.  Reviewing 600 standards is an administrative burden that could stop any small to medium sized business in its tracks: the Drone Standards Info Portal by AW-Drones “will allow the quick and easy identification of the suitable standards to apply a given mitigation stemming from the SORA methodology.”

USING THE PORTAL

The project has gathered all of the standards into one place – and made them searchable.  Here’s how it works:

The AW-Drones Info Portal will allow finding and displaying information about a standard, providing an easy access to the stored data via live search and filters (by requirements, domain or keywords). The system also will enable advanced researches by category of operations. For each standard, the title, document, organisation, status, external url, domain, keywords, description, and requirements will be displayed. In addition, users may become editors and add comments or new standards, under supervision of administrators, to further improve the tool. So, the Drone Standards Info Portal is not a new standard, but it works like a compass for orientation among the hundreds of available standards: that is why it is a “metastandard”, the only metastandard in the EU that connects SORA to the myriad of existing industry standards.

Drone companies also have access to EuroUSC-Italia‘s web-based tool to help providers apply the SORA methodology: SAMWISE.

“For EuroUSC-Italia, this is one of the main achievements: the Drone Standards Info Portal goes hand in hand with SAMWISE, providing users both a safety assessment and a list of standards to implement mitigations” said Marco Ducci, CEO of EuroUSC-Italia.

LAUNCH EVENT

The Drone Standards Info Portal will be launched during the 2nd AW-Drones workshop, “Technical Standards to Support U-Space Implementation in Europe”. The free workshop will take place online on 5 November 2020, at 9.30 CEST (pre-registration required.) Attendees will have the opportunity to share viewpoints and identify priorities and needs in support of U-Space in Europe, contributing to the EU rulemaking process.