Column by Deputy General Director of the Aeroscript Research Center Andrey Yablokov about unmanned air traffic control systems

The emergence of UTM systems (unmanned air traffic management), or unmanned air traffic control systems, in various countries has become a response to the sharp increase in the number of drones (UAV) and the need for mass flights in national airspaces.

For example, US-based Zipline, which operates mainly in African countries, expects to reach 1 million air deliveries by the end of 2023 and fly more departures than most existing commercial airlines by 2025. Only one Zipline logistics center in Ghana carries out about 100 thousand UAV flights per year (up to 1 thousand flights per day). For comparison: according to the Federal State Unitary Enterprise “State ATM Corporation”, for the entire 2022, 98 thousand UAV flights were carried out in Russia.

Growing unmanned traffic is supported by services provided by automated systems. According to McKinsey, just five years ago, startups that specialize only in UTM attracted $371 million in investments in the United States. During this time, many more rounds, high-profile transactions and acquisitions took place, so now the numbers have increased by an order of magnitude. According to one of the key industry publications, Unmanned Airspace, the global market for UTM systems will grow to $827 million by 2027.

For the effective operation of digital platforms, technical means of detecting and monitoring drone flights and their identification, dividing unmanned aircraft into legal and illegal are required.

Now UTM systems are mainly focused on reducing the time to obtain flight permission as the main current limiting barrier. But in the future the share of other services provided during and after the flight will increase. This is a service for assessing the risks of operations, information about surrounding traffic in the flight area, and tactical deconfliction.

The emergence of anti-drone systems was also a response to the growing number of UAVs and the need to prevent threats associated with them. Typically, anti-drone systems are deployed to protect airports, fuel and energy enterprises and other critical infrastructure facilities. But in some countries with a difficult political situation, they are already being deployed en masse around the perimeters of cities that are at risk of drone attacks (for example, in Israel, South Korea, Saudi Arabia).

UTM systems primarily rely on surveillance data, where transponders, transponders, drones or control panels themselves “communicate” with ground infrastructure. Anti-drone systems to detect “aliens” mainly use radars that detect illegal UAV flights, radio direction finders, video cameras, thermal imagers, etc.

Given that each technology has its limitations (for example, a radio direction finder is useless if the drone is in autonomous mode and does not transmit data to the control panel; and acoustic surveillance systems may be ineffective in urban noise pollution environments), a combination of tools is necessary.

For such a large metropolis as Moscow, the infrastructure for detecting and neutralizing illegal UAVs is formed on the basis of a threat model and can consist of dozens of locators and direction finders, hundreds of video surveillance cameras, and a corresponding number of means of suppressing UAVs. This is tens of billions of rubles.

Andrey Yablokov, Deputy General Director of the Aeroscript Research Center, JARUS, Eurocae, RTCA expert