Towards safe and autonomous drones. The contribution of Simcenter Amesim to the European research project COMP4DRONES.
Drones can perform a variety of operations that manned aircraft struggle with, bringing significant economic savings and environmental benefits. Drones have seen an increasing amount of attention as an evolving industry. However, the use of drones for these applications, especially those in populated areas or into non-segregated airspace, is currently not possible without the development and validation of certain key enabling technologies to manage the flight [1]. Drones’ innovation is often limited by the dependence on interoperable proprietary technologies. COMP4DRONES [3] is an ECSEL JU project that will provide a framework of key enabling technologies for safe and autonomous drones. Siemens Digital Industries Software contributes to the COMP4DRONES project bringing its expertise in systems simulation and making available to other partners the software tool Simcenter Amesim, a leading system simulation platform. The four key benefits that system simulation can bring to drones design and operation are the following:
- Analysis of the vehicle performance under different operating conditions and for different missions.
- Virtual systems integration which, thanks to Simcenter Amesim multi-physics modeling capabilities, can be achieved from the early phases of the design cycle
- Mixed-fidelity approach provides the benefit of scalable modelling strategy, where the model accuracy can evolve along with the design cycles as design decisions are made and more information of the product becomes available.
- Support drone’s modularity, which is fundamental to realize the concept of product “family” and hence increasing the design and operation cost-effectiveness of a drone.
