This demonstrator, led by Indra, will focus on the deployment of drones as monitoring devices of the road traffic conditions and the detection and early response to incidents. The objective is to apply the use of drones to improve the efficiency and automation of monitoring activities, as well as to lower their costs, upgrade the control and maintenance of transportation operations and their infrastructure, offering greater flexibility and stability in solutions and services.
Up until now, the usage of drones by Spanish transport operators and road authorities has been limited to test pilots. Current applications involving drones are not integrated into the transport control center – platform/system. With this demonstrator, the ambition is to widen the spectrum of traffic incidents and locations that could benefit from drone services (enhance safety in the operations of road management) by reducing the response time to the incident location, the risk and exposure to danger for the road agents, and the accident investigation time as accurate and detailed data is collected in less time and provide high quality images/data of the incident in real time, with the ability to cover multiple road points and large area extensions, accessing to difficult areas and adding new image capabilities.
It will integrate Indra’s transportation management solution (HORUS) with its own unmanned aircraft system traffic management (UTM) platform in low-altitude airspace and its Drone Mission and Data Processing Center (CMPD), thus creating a pioneering comprehensive solution for intermodal mobility, unprecedented in the market, which will provide infrastructure managers with an array of new and secure drone applications.
This application will be deployed at the Rozas Aerodrome in Lugo (Spain), part of the Civil UAVs Initiative, a Xunta de Galicia project that is the driving force of the unmanned aerial systems for civil applications sector in Europe, in which Indra acts as an anchor company.
In addition, this demonstrator will use Indra’s Mantis fixed-wing drone, developing a civil use version for innovative transportation applications. Among other improvements, Indra will work on the detection capabilities of Mantis, in order to facilitate both the processing and the analysis of the images and videos obtained