Drones Resilience. Capability to Cope with Unpredicted Events

The last twenty years have seen a veritable "drone-mania", with newspaper articles and TV shows extolling the virtues of these "new" machines, capable, it seems, of fulfilling the most unheard-of promises, of being deployed in a wide range of fields, both civil and military. However, these devices are not as new as all that, since their origins can be traced back to the First World War, with the work of British engineer Archibald Low, who in 1916 developed the "Aerial Target", remotely controlled by radio waves. In France, in 1917, Captain Max Boucher flew a Voisin aircraft without a pilot on board. Since then, a great deal of work, experimentation and, ultimately, the development of industrial products have been accumulated. At the beginning of 2021, the FAA estimated that there were 1,782,479 registered drones, and 208,010 certified remote pilots. UAVs also have their own trade shows (UAV show, Xponential, etc.) and, in research, their own dedicated conference for several years (International Conference on UAS).

Yet there are still (very) few companies dedicated to professional, profitable drones, and the actual explosion in sales that has been prophesied for years has (still) not happened. Why hasn't it?

One of the reasons, and perhaps the main one, lies in the regulatory environment, which has not yet reached a level of maturity that would allow us to routinely carry out the most useful operations, which will be presented later, those that offer major markets and significant economic prospects. In return, if these regulations have not really emerged, it's not because of a lack of will, but because these complex contexts raise technical challenges that need to be overcome in order to correctly define a safe mission. And this starts with defining the right level of safety to authorize, for example, the flight of a drone transporting packages – a fortiori passengers – over a city. This level is neither that of a toy designed to fly in the immediate vicinity of its remote control pilot and far from any passer-by, nor that of an A380... But how to define it precisely, and what constraints to impose: these are questions that are more complex than they appear. Behind these vast questions lies the question of "hazards", all those problems that can occur – that will occur – during a drone's flight: an actuator that jams, a sensor that breaks down... To cope with these hazards, we need to develop real resilience for drones: a considerable challenge, for which solutions are still in their infancy.

The subject of discussion –– drones will first be resituated: what are they, what are they used for, and what could they be used for? The links between regulations and technical and technological issues will then be presented, and the question of resilience...