REALITY has performed its Final Workshop in the BCN Drone Center. The goal of REALITY is to promote the use of EGNOS for safe drone operations, in the short term and in the context of the EU drone operations vision, the U-space.

REALITY studied the so-called Navigation System Error (NSE) -that is, the accuracy of the navigation solution- and Flight Technical Error (FTE) -the deviation from the desired course-. These two factors are the main contributors to the Required Navigation Performance (RNP) metric, which is the object of interest in our project. REALITY aims at giving a new sense to the RNP figures, which have been traditionaly used only for manned aviation, and adapt them for the drone community needs.

A key in this scheme is to generate “statstically meaningul” data; that is, as many samples of data as possible in order to decouple the various variables that play a role in RNP performance level, such as: type of drone, type of flight, autopilot settings, weather conditions -specially, wind-, etc. This is why more than a hundred flight data sets have been produced as a basis for this analysis.

The partner in charge for the intensive flights, CATUAV, has integrated the REALITY Navigation Unit (RNU), developed by Pildo Labs, that incoroporates all the necessary navigation equipment in order to perform the RNP analysis. After every bunch of data collection, GeoNumerics is in charge of generating the RNP analysis. Aiming to represent the two most representative drone types, a rotary-wing and a fixed-wing platform have been selected for the integration of the RNU.

Check the full workshop in the following video:

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