ASTRAEA Preps for Phase Three



By Brett Davis



The ASTRAEA program is seeking £40 million in new funding to launch a third round of work aimed at integrating medium and large unmanned aircraft into European skies.



Simon Jewell, chairman of ASTRAEA's steering board, says half the funding would come from industry and half from the government, and, assuming the money comes through, the new phase should launch in January.
In the meantime, the program is working with regulators to try to meet European Union goals of partial UAS integration by 2018 and full, extensive integration by 2028.




ASTRAEA's second phase, which wrapped up last year, included a flight by BAE Systems' optionally manned flying test bed aircraft, which was tracked and guided by air traffic controllers alongside manned aircraft.
The next phase will include similar flights by actual unmanned aircraft, Jewell said at a briefing at the Farnborough Airshow 2014. ASTRAEA focuses on systems weighing 150 kilograms and higher.




The effort will include work to bolster public opinion about UAS, which Jewell said will be critical.




"One of the big challenges of the whole UAS sector is to move public opinion forward," he said.




Automobiles took three decades to win public support, he said, and modern UAS are still in that phase.



The program also includes technology improvement efforts, including onboard sense-and-avoid systems. Efforts in the United States to handle detection using ground-based radars would not work in Europe, he noted in a separate interview after his presentation.




Poaching Prevention



Protecting endangered animals from poachers is an increasingly popular use for unmanned aircraft.



The startup company Skycap, in fact, grew out of that use. The company began as ShadowView, a charity devoted to fighting poaching. The charity developed its own aircraft and then founded Skycap to make money to support the antipoaching efforts.




Founder Laurens de Groot says Skycap is focusing on four market areas precision agriculture, engineering, security and humanitarian crises response.



For the latter use, the company could deploy anywhere within 24 hours, he says, and "Right now we are working with the Red Cross in the Netherlands to make this happen."




Skycap has developed small but long-endurance systems, including its latest, a quadrotor UAS dubbed Shadow Rotor, which can fly for an hour.



Shadow Rotor, making its debut at the show, is more suited to operations in crowded regions such as Europe, where fixed-wing systems may be less practical.