This project brings together expertise and skills from large and small organisations, universities and non-profit research and technology organisations to demonstrate the technological and socio-economic viability of a drone-enabled distribution network for medical items such as organs, blood products, high-value medicines and medical consumables over Scotland. The goal is to design an innovative logistic network capable of providing increased responsiveness and capillarity of medical delivery in urban and rural geography uniquely found in Scotland, while ensuring lower costs, reliability, robustness, safety and regulatory compliance. A digital demonstrator will be created with computer models of the different components of this system of systems, such as a digital model of the drones, the ground infrastructure needed to recharge the vehicles and the system used to manage the traffic of drones while flying. By exploring various operating conditions and different configurations of the network and by ensuring that appropriate market analyses and public perception are accurately taken into consideration, a digital blue print of the drone delivery network will be created connecting potentially hundreds of hospitals, pathology laboratories, distribution centres and GP units. The integration of digital technology demonstration with market analyses, stakeholder engagement and assessment of public perception is a key objective of the project as these elements are recognised barriers to adoption of drone services that need to be addressed to be able to reach a viable and accepted solution and therefore develop this emerging sector which is expected to bring a significant social and economic benefit to Scotland. Regulatory challenges are another key focus area, URANOS aims to address these by conducting a series of live trials aimed to inform the regulatory pathways in the definition of protocols and rules for safe operation of autonomous drones in the same airspace as civil transport aircraft. Despite focussing on such a specific use case as medical delivery and being tailored to the specific geographical region of Scotland, URANOS could also have impact on a larger scale. In addition to the healthcare sector benefits, URANOS will open the way to the deployment of drone-enabled logistics in other sectors of the economy. It will change the way airspace is managed and utilised by manned and unmanned vehicles and will favour the realisation of sustainability goals, such as the carbon neutrality of distribution networks, supporting the energy transition and contributing towards the Scottish Government's target of a 75% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2045\.

Fly2Plan - _Enabling a new model aviation data system-of-systems_ seeks to develop a new model for aviation data exchange to allow new entrants in urban air mobility and autonomous operations to participate. By researching the use of modern and emerging internet technologies of public cloud infrastructure and distributed ledger technology, the decentralised operating models built over generations of pioneering aviation discovery can be preserved, whilst transforming operating resilience and costs for the community. Fly2Plan directly addresses the following themes: * ATM&UTM: Fly2Plan vision is to develop a set of open-source Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) technologies and platform that underpin all aspects of airport, ATM, UTM, flight and UAV operations based on distributed ledger technology such as Blockchain. * Digital Infrastructure: solution for the transformation of legacy systems into agile, on-cloud interoperable platforms, to enable secure plug-and-play interactions between partners in the ecosystem. * Digital Communication Systems: as digital data and voice communication systems mature in the ATC environment, a natural evolution to more data traffic and less voice will occur. Fy2Plan offers the tools in order to enable this transformation. * Viable, challenging, use cases: a variety of users will benefit from Fly2Plan technology: drone operators, traffic controllers, UTM platform providers, ANSPs, airlines, airports, military, baggage handling providers, ground handling providers... As part of this, end users are represented within the consortium and the rest have been approached during proposal preparation to gather their insights and needs and will be part of WP5 conversations to refine use cases. There are several of them already being considered: 1. Flight Plan and Operation of Autonomous UAV BVLOS in non-segregated air space 2. New Capacity Model definition, with headroom quantified 3. Trajectories management, enabling fuel burn reduction in stacks and rewarding excellence in planning. 4. Vehicle technologies enablement -- autonomous flight (UAVs, eVTOLs, automated aircraft,...) will not happen if there is no provision of data such as flight data (FIXM), aeronautical info (AIXM) and weather (WIXM) from an open, reliable system-of-systems as the one Fly2Plan will develop. The Consortium is well balanced and formed by thirteen partners from across multiple sectors and disciplines. Within these partners, big corporates, start-ups and research institutions are included: * Operations: Heathrow Airport, IAG, Consortiq, Altitude Angel, Cranfield University, NATS * Technology: SITA, IBS, Snowflake Software, TEKTowr, Rockport Software * Research: Oxford University, Cranfield University * Product Management Office: Digital Catapult. The project is divided into five costed 'Industrial research' work packages. * WP1 -- Product Design and Project Management * WP2 -- Governance model definition * WP3 -- Development of the new open-source DLT platform\] * WP4 -- Trust Assurance Mechanisms * WP5 -- Communication, IPR strategy and Phase III preparation The project has obtained letters of support from relevant stakeholders as: Eurocontrol, ACI, UAE GCAA, Gatwick Airport, Microsoft and the Industry Resilience Group interested in the value Fly2Plan could unlock for them and want to monitor the progress of the project. The project has a total duration of 15 months and total cost of £4,670,932, where partners are co-funding 51%.

It's vitally important we keep our infrastructure, construction & industrial sites running. In 2018 construction provided 3m jobs and contributed £250 billion to the UK economy or 15% of UK GDP. More broadly, engineering enterprises employed 19% of the UK labour force and generated 23% of the UK's turnover. Against a backdrop of skills shortages costing UK businesses £1.7bn / year, the COVID-19 pandemic is making a bad situation worse - with additional labour shortages; reduced workforce efficiency; and planners unsure who will show up for work. This pandemic may continue for many more months, perhaps even years. As such, we urgently need to accelerate remote inspection and monitoring. This project aims to address this need. Conventional drone services are delivered under visual line of sight (VLOS) regulations. Scaling these services requires building a large team of drone pilots and managing their travel to/from mission sites. This approach is resource constrained, inconsistent and expensive - and as a result is very difficult to scale. In contrast, sees.ai's solution teams pilots in remote control rooms with highly-automated drones on the client site, to enable the remote execution of complex missions BVLOS. This concentration of resources in a control room significantly improves scalability (zero travel means fewer pilots required) and introduces economies of scale, scope and learning which result in improved quality, capability and cost. In the context of COVID-19 this project will help us return to normal operation, safety levels and quality control, as follows: 1\. By accelerating remote inspection & monitoring, this solution will reduce the number of site workers involved, freeing them for productive work. 2\. By providing office workers with better information at their desks, this solution will help them optimise build and maintenance work without needing to visit site. 3\. By reducing the number of people visiting site, this solution will help operators reduce infection risk which could potentially lead to site shutdown. Beyond COVID-19 the sees.ai solution represents the state-of-the-art in a long-term trend towards enabling remote inspection and monitoring - linked to the evolution of BIM, reality capture and the digital twin. Project partners include some of the UK's biggest users of drones today and some of the companies most likely to benefit from drones in the future. These companies see the value in aerial intelligence and see the sees.ai solution as a potential way to access it at the scale and quality required.