Aeronautical safety: AcrOSS Comes to a Successful Conclusion
The final event of the AcrOSS project was held on 7th June 2022 at the Marcello Arlotta Airport in Taranto-Grottaglie.
With the aim of safely and efficiently integrating the flight operations of small drones within controlled areas, and with a special focus on airports, the AcrOSS project was launched at the end of 2018 with a budget of almost four million euros, of which eighty percent was destined for Southern Italian companies and universities. The activities completed on 7TH June were developed over a 42-month period by a group that included Fincantieri NexTech, through its subsidiary IDS Ingegneria Dei Sistemi SpA, Exprivia, TopView, University of Salento, University of Bologna and Aeroporti di Puglia. This varied design team was conceived with the declared aim of being part of the effort to relaunch the competitiveness of the economic infrastructure of Southern Italy.
The main contribution of IDS, the project leader, was to develop technologies for the detection and tracking of small drones within the airport, the creation of “drone boxes”, which are miniaturized devices for the identification and tracking of cooperating drones, and a command and control console for the management and exchange of information between the subsystems and the platform.
As part of the event, a live demo was also organized with a drone inside the airport to demonstrate how the system functions. Contingency conditions were created by simulating the presence of a non-cooperating drone in the airspace of the airport. This led to the AcrOSS system rescheduling the use of the airspace by the drone dynamically and in safe conditions.
