Athens-commanded drone lands at BCN Drone Center!

Last month, the BCN Drone Center was participant on a spectacular demonstration of the capabilities of Horizon 2020 project RAWFIE.

During the demonstration two UAVs were launched from the BCN Drone Center testbed and controlled by the RAWFIE infrastructure with a Main Ground Control Center in Athens. The UAVs were instructed to follow a UGV deployed in the same testbed. While the three devices performed their mission plan, all telemetry data was transmitted to the RAWFIE Control Center in Athens. At the same time, the BCN Drone Center Chief Technical Officer, was following from Namibia all the mission connected securely to the RAWFIE servers, monitoring all the activities. All the operation was securely supervised by the BCN Drone Center staff, acting as man-in-the-loop, in order to recover safely the systems in case of malfunction or emergency.

This was a very successful demonstration with three devices operating remotely, with a main control room at several thousand kilometers away and with remote monitoring of the whole operation from the southern hemisphere. A really impressive demonstration of the RAWFIE capabilities.

RAWFIE is a FIRE+ project that relies on the concept of an extended infrastructure for remote experimentation using Unmanned devices (UAVs – Unmanned Aerial Vehicles; USV – Unmanned Surface Vehicles; and UGVs – Unmanned Ground Vehicles). These devices, hosted in different testing facilities around Europe are available for research purposes to virtually any experimenter worldwide in a similar way as the modern astronomical observatories are working today. This project has received funding from “HORIZON 2020” the European Union’s Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 645220. The BCN Drone Center of CATUAV was selected in the Open Call 1 as an aerial testbed for the RAWFIE extended infrastructure