Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are widely used today in a broad range of applications. When flying UAVs in civil environments, they are controlled by a human pilot and in the case that a UAV exceeds a specific weight limit, the human pilot must hold a special certificate which ensures their ability to safely fly this aircraft. In  the project INCONTROL-RL (Innovative, civil UAV Control Platform ReLoaded) research and development of a platform at TRL 4 level for the autonomous operation of UAVs and light air-taxi aircraft is envisioned. For this purpose, a back-bone network will allow to combine fully digitized air-vehicle control using AI elements and to investigate its certifiability, in cooperation with the project partner Airbus Defense & Space Germany. The ultimate goal of the project is to create a laboratory platform with the complete avionics of a UAV-like helicopter. This will pave the way for further miniaturization of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) avionic components as well as assessing their compliance to airworthiness rules and processes. INCONTROL-RL will observe the airworthiness processes and design rules in order to assure that its results can serve as the basis for the planned carry-on development up to the product level.

Project partners: TTTech Computertechnik AG, TU Wien/Institute for Microelectronics,Schiebel Elektronische Geräte GmbH, Johannes Kepler Universität Linz/Institute for Machine Learning, Austro Control Österreichische Gesellschaft für Zivilluftfahrt mit beschränkter Haftung, Airbus Defence & Space (Germany).

This project is financially supported by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG).