This use case will demonstrate the technology developed in COMP4DRONES in the Transport domain. The aim of this use case is to optimize and enhance transport control, operation and infrastructure management activities, such as traffic management (traffic status and incidents), monitoring and maintenance of road conditions with the use of drones.
Demonstrator 1: Road Transport Management
This demonstrator will focus on the deployment of drones as monitoring devices of the road traffic conditions and the detection and early response to incidents. The drone facilities will incorporate capabilities to request a drone’s flight over an area of the infrastructure identified by its operators. 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. Moreover, drones can help reduce incident response times and operational risks and increase safety and sustainability.
This demonstrator will use drones as sensors for current transportation monitoring systems. It will develop image and video processing tools based on graphics cards as well as artificial intelligence and deep learning technologies to analyze video and images taken by the drones, so that incidents can be automatically detected.
It will integrate Indra’s transportation management solution (HORUS) with its own unmanned aircraft system traffic management (UTM) platform in low-altitude airspace, 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.