Aircomm4EU

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  Easily detect gatherings.

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  Manage drones and plan their trajectories.

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  Locate crowds and send an alert to authorized personnel.

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  Our mission is to scale up drones usage to unlock their true potential!

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  Our ideas keep evolving!

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  Business Model Canvas

Aircomm4EU was born to control the containment of the epidemic emergency through drone employment. Drones can be a useful instrument at society’s service in order to lighten police’s workload, save time on patrolling to focus on more important activities and cut off the costs the government has to face.

One of the most critical intervention to prevent the spread of COVID-19 is crowd control, mainly carried out by local police, helicopters and supervised drone patrolling. These methods are not scalable due to limited personnel, helicopter preparation time, its flight costs and the actual need of qualified operators to control drones.

Aircomm4EU simplifies crowd control and helps to reduce the spread of infections. Aircomm4EU supports local authorities to optimize their work and save time using a clear platform to check gatherings and manage multiple drones from a central point of view (the Mission Control Center).

Drones are configured to follow a planned trajectory and they report the number of people in their sight. They help evaluate the population density in wide and remote areas, returning an heat map that can be used by:

• Local authorities to notice any violation and to check the respect of emergency restrictions.
• Citizens to locate and avoid crowded places.

This solution has a great impact on society because, having the possibility to check gatherings in a more efficient way, Governments would not be forced to apply severe restrictions. Thus, people are able come back to their daily routines and the economy can restart.

Is citizen privacy compromised?

Aircomm4EU is ethical and privacy respectful because the system is designed to detect only the number of people over an area of interest. Data are open, so they can be accessed by any citizen; they do not relate to individuals, but to the whole population.

How does it work?

We want to offer the possibility to innovate using cloud-based services, which could be exploited to collect and elaborate drone data. With the help of Machine Learning, it will be possible to automatically detect gatherings and retrieve a rapid and ever-changing density map, both in and outside the city.

To this end, Aircomm4EU is an Internet of Drones project whose aim is to allow drone control using the existing cellular telecommunication infrastructure through a platform of automated mission control. Drones need a camera sensor (traditional or thermal imaging to be more anonymous), a machine learning model to count the number of people and a transceiver capable of mobile connectivity.

This approach is scalable for different reasons:

• Multiple drones can be controlled remotely through a cloud platform which could be accessed by local authorities.
• Our adapter can be installed on drones that do not support 4G and 5G communication technologies.

Such system empowers the safeguard operations, allowing data collection and real-time processing in a cloud platform in order to locate crowds, while sending an alert to authorized personnel.

What is needed to continue this project?

This project heavily relies on research and development activities mainly focused on adapter design, cloud platform engineering and autonomous remote drone control.

Key partners are:

• Cellular Internet Service Providers to ensure a reliable network connectivity.
• Drone manufacturers to provide drones ready out of the box.
• Cloud providers to sustain service capacity at scale.
• Internet of Drones Research Units to keep improving technology capabilities.
• State Aviation Authorities to regulate Beyond Visual Line of Sight operations.

After the emergency…

Smart Cities can integrate Aircomm4EU for other kinds of activities such as:

• Interconnection with vehicular networks for traffic sensing.
• Efficient management of emergency situations.
• Illegal landfills and waste disposals.
• Smart shipping.
• Support local authorities, and citizens at the same time, to reduce crime.