Application Cluster "Unmanned Flying"

The development of unmanned and autonomous flight offers great potential for value creation in Bavaria, especially through new business areas such as urban air mobility and drone technology.

In addition to unmanned personal transportation in the third dimension, a wide range of applications are possible through unmanned aerial systems, individually or as a swarm, e.g., searching for missing persons, rapid damage assessment after accidents or disasters, transporting urgently needed items such as medicines to hard-to-reach locations, effective and environmentally friendly agriculture by collecting data on agricultural land, environmental protection by collecting precise data on animal and plant populations, rapid access to locations on structures that are otherwise difficult or impossible to reach, and traffic optimization through accurate real-time data on traffic. In addition, temporary infrastructure services, such as flying radio relays to increase the range of local radio links, are conceivable.

Shared spaces

AI algorithms play an important role for the operation of unmanned aerial systems in the safe execution of flight, coordination of swarms, interaction with humans, and integration into the airspace shared with manned aircraft. In this context, they are used for sensor signal processing for airspace and obstacle awareness, as well as autonomous trajectory planning and decision making for safe and efficient flight control of individual flight systems and drone swarms . These AI algorithms can be executed by small unmanned aerial systems due to the increased computational power of on-board embedded systems to provide appropriate sensor data collection, processing, and fusion for the applications enumerated above and to act on these results while still in flight. Furthermore, AI algorithms enable faster and more robust development of increasingly complex flight systems. The focus is on reducing design iterations through "generative designs" as well as proving the performance of AI algorithms, which is essential in aeronautical engineering.