56 Digest | RigiTech Eiger UAV aircraft get too close are largely in the cloud, but the algorithms triggering the UAV to take regulation-compliant avoidance manoeuvres (including route recalculations) are installed in the onboard computer. “That’s very important, because it’s fundamentally the UAV that needs to get out of the way, and we never want it to not do the avoidance behaviours because of a dropped data link or faulty modem,” Klaptocz says. “But you can see why we need to control and define both the cloud intelligence and the drone intelligence, as well as the connectivity systems and the embedded computers, to create a solution where all the alerts and avoidances and so on mesh together as part of a sliding scale. Some software lives on the drone, some on the cloud, but all of it follows our plan. Anyone who makes just one or the other is going to hit a wall at some point when trying to do uncrewed logistics fleets.” The UAV flies waypoints stored internally (whether preprogrammed briefly or long before a given flight), adhering to numerous rules, geocages, and multiple layers of warnings and corrections in the event of deviations. For RigiTech’s systems in Europe, each BVLOS route must be approved under the Specific Operations Risk Assessment (SORA) methodology, which involves examining each route, kilometre by kilometre, to evaluate the airspace to be traversed, the population to be flown over and other factors. “Based on the ensuing risk level, each route falls into a SORA class, and if it’s too high, you can’t fly, which then entails going around certain airspaces or populated areas,” Klaptocz says. “So, designing a 50 km delivery route is actually quite complicated. It can take weeks, even months – and there’s consultants who will charge tens of thousands of euros to design a SORA for you – but to save our customers that time and money, we’ve built an auto-planning tool into RigiCloud.” The auto-planning tool stores considerable SORA-relevant data, including that on worldwide terrain to account for elevation and CFIT risks, worldwide airspace-segmentation data, including airports, and global population data (including specific population distribution data for certain countries, such as Switzerland, France and Luxembourg). This data is ingested by the tool’s auto-planning algorithm, as needed, to plan a route between pairs of specified takeoff and landing points. The population data toggle is programmed so the end-user can specify a maximum number or concentration of people that their central aviation authority permits sub-25 kg UAVs to fly over. “That automates the route generation, avoiding highly populated places, whether the user’s fleets can fly over a mountain or are required to fly around it, and it also automates the geocage around your route, basically giving you your whole SORA in one click, ready for submission to EASA, instead of taking six months of work,” Klaptocz says. Safety landings RigiTech’s autonomy algorithms also define exact equations for which paths to follow to avoid mid-air collisions and make course corrections. Returns to base are generated onboard the UAV, such that no-one needs to manually select a new chain of waypoints, or open a guidebook on air traffic or public safety to determine where it cannot go on its new path. Those algorithms have been optimised over time to account for edge cases, such as calculating the route needed if (or when) the operator changes their mind mid-return and requests that the UAV reinitiate its mission. “If the fleet manager needs a UAV to return home, they just click a button on the interface and Eiger plots a regulation-compliant return path,” Klaptocz says. “Yesterday, we released a battery SoC estimation and prediction algorithm, so if it determines that it just won’t have the battery energy to return home, it selects a prudent safety landing spot from a predefined map of them and engages in an autonomous landing onto that. “All of that together was key to making sure no one operator needs to look at any one UAV to the exclusion of others. Our overview, whether you’re selecting a April/May 2025 | Uncrewed Systems Technology The UAV’s regulation-compliant autonomy includes directives to land safely at predefined ‘rally points’ in case of flight issues; these can be open fields, parking lots and the like
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