SafePilot – Inherently Safe Robotic Aircraft for Civilian Applications

SafePilot is a ground-breaking concept for the safe operation of small Unmanned Aerial
Vehicles (UAVs) in civilian airspace. Small UAVs have been successfully deployed in the
military domain to provide surveillance in hostile situations. The demand for civilian use of
small UAVs is increasing in a range of public and private sector activities, including
agriculture, construction, infrastructure management, oil and gas exploration,
telecommunications and earth sciences research, as well as public services such as
environmental monitoring, weather forecasting, law enforcement, search and rescue,
emergency response and homeland security.
A key barrier to entry into the civilian domain is that developers are unable to guarantee that
their UAVs will not violate regulatory limits when operated by non-specialist end users. The
CAA, for example, requires vehicles to remain within 500m of their operators and below 400
ft at all times, outside buffer zones around settlements, man-made structures and airfields, and
outside of temporarily restricted areas.
SafePilot is an automatic flight management system that provides inherently safe navigation
of small UAVs.
Current flight management systems provide no means of automatically satisfying regulatory
constraints, and the UAVs that use them cannot therefore be considered inherently safe.
Therefore, the CAA requires each operation of a small UAV to be individually sanctioned,
which is impractical for most applications, and is deterring end users from acquiring systems.
SafePilot is innovative because it provides inherently safe mission planning and operational
control for small UAVs in civilian airspace independently of operator competence: a true
world first with the potential to open up a vast market for small UAVs.