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usepe grid

About us

What we do

USEPE is an Exploratory Research Project funded by the SESAR Joint Undertaking. It aims at exploring potential separation methods to ensure the safety of drone operations in urban environments, with a particular focus on densely populated areas.

How we do it

USEPE will propose, develop and evaluate a concept of operations and a set of enabling technologies to ensure the safe separation of drones (from each other and from manned aviation).

To this end, following steps will be conducted:

  • 01

    Identify who shall be making the decisions

    Throughout the strategic and tactical planning phases, define actors who should make decisions: drones themselves, U-space systems, local authorities, etc. Which use cases have priority, what governance and what trajectories for drones.

  • 02

    Define and simulate a set of concepts

    To provide safe separation for different kinds of drones, in each planning phase. Concepts include density-based separation (when crowding occurs), and geo-vectoring (assign speed limitations in the function of position). Research also covers machine learning algorithms that can enhance these concepts.

  • 03

    Assess the impact of the proposed concepts

    On different Key Performance Areas (KPAs), including safety, capacity, and efficiency, to derive conclusions and recommendations on the most adequate approach for each operational environment. incl. safety, capacity, and efficiency.

Expected Outcomes

The project’s main outcomes will be:

  • An Initial Concept of Operation, with proposals for an Urban Space Separation Management System
  • A set of validation experiments of the proposed solutions, to complete the V1 phase as defined by E-OCVM (European Operational Concept Validation Methodology) and achieve the TRL2 (Technology Readiness Level).