Navigating Drone/eVTOL Trends and Challenges with the Digital Catalonia Alliance

Cristina: Sure. Well, thank you very much, Clara, for inviting us. It's a pleasure for me to join the podcast today, and thank you for the introduction. Well, as part of my background, I am an aeronautical engineer. I did my bachelor's degree in airports engineering and my master's in drones, unmanned aerial systems, both at the Technical University of Catalonia.

And I got involved in the drone sector, I would say, almost back in 2014, almost when this technology, drones, did its very first boom. I must admit at that time, the emerging technology of drones caught my attention completely. And I really wanted to learn more about it. So I had the chance to study drones at the university while still in the bachelor’s.

And back in 2016 I started my professional experience in the drone sector. Thanks to my bachelor’s thesis, I also worked in different SMEs. For instance, HEMAV Technology, which used to be one of the biggest drone service providers at the time in Spain. And I also worked in the research area with, ICARUS Research group with a joint project for our Technical University of Catalonia. Back in the masters, I worked with U-space European projects. And I did some drone manufacturing as well with another drone company.

During the last four years, I have worked as a project manager in i2CAT Foundation, in which I manage both regional and European projects related, all of them with drones.

And now I manage the drone community of the Digital Catalonia Alliance, which is a joint initiative promoted by the Government of Catalonia and the i2CAT Foundation. This is a project to boost the economic strategy and strategic technologies at regional level. The role of i2CAT in all of that is we are a research foundation, we are a CERCA technological research center that leads R&D&i activities around advanced digital technologies and their architecture, application and services.

We collaborate with SMEs, corporations, also public administrations, academic institutions, and users to contribute to the definition on structuring of the digital universe of digital innovation systems.

Cristina: Yeah, sure. As mentioned earlier, the Digital Catalonia Alliance is a joint initiative promoted by the Government of Catalonia and i2CAT Foundation that gathers the main emerging technological sectors of Catalonia to help them to consolidate. Our initiative is visionary, disruptive, collaborative, and we focus on technological communities, technical communities.

Nowadays the Digital Catalonia Alliance has roughly 550 members. Most of them are SMEs, and we have six digital communities. Among them: IoT, drones, artificial intelligence, new space, cybersecurity and blockchain. And we provide a set of services to dynamize these ecosystems and support startups and emerging companies of deep tech to connect them.

In the current context it’s essential to collaborate and to carry out joint projects between companies and to add value and have proposals with a higher probability of success. So, we facilitate these kinds of collaboration between actors of different fields, technologies and also knowledge. And we also facilitate the opportunities to promote the encounter of these SMEs with the demand.

We evangelize also on the potential fields of application of these technologies. Most of them are still not taken by the market, so it’s still the very beginning of the adoption. And we also try to mitigate the pain points of these ecosystems in areas such as seeking for funds, the lack of talent…

Some of those pain points may be challenges that each community can overcome per se, but some of these challenges are common among the different communities that we have. And we work with our members, we listen to them and we define our services according to their needs to respond to them, basically.

Cristina: All right, so I have to be fair with you. Since I've been in this sector from the very beginning, I hardly ever get impressed by new digital evolutions. What blows my mind though are the use cases. For instance, in Catalonia, we have some experience in drone delivery for medical purposes. In May, one of our members, AldoraTech, did a demonstration at the hospital of Olot. So a really local hospital in Girona at the northeast corner of Catalonia and Spain. And they transported blood samples.

In July, another member of our drone community, called the Barcelona Drone Center, did a drone delivery as well, but in a completely different field. They transported biological fluids for veterinarian purposes in a pig farm. So you see, it's the same use case – drone delivery – but completely different customers. 

So this is what just blows my mind because I mean, you can figure out another solution with the same technological tools. And if I had to remark some solutions that particularly caught my eye recently, I would say the solutions for precision agriculture and farming, that I think are really interesting and can take on some recent challenges. 

There are solutions that can perform fruit and vegetable picking. And these solutions combine artificial intelligence, robotics, and they perform highly automated or even autonomous missions. I find these kinds of solutions particularly interesting because they can help farmers, for instance, to deal with the most immediate effects of climate change.

This summer has been particularly hot in Spain and Europe, and farmers had to change their work schedule by getting up earlier in the morning, stopping during the hottest hours of the day, and then resuming the harvesting or the labor in the crops when the temperature was lower.

Last year only – I have to give you some figures – there were almost 61,000 people killed in Europe related to heat related issues. So, I think that this kind of automated drones can contribute to deal with these hard labor jobs and also with these physical tasks and also potentially to save people's lives eventually.

If solutions such as this, or similar ones, are uptaken eventually by the market, by the society, they have a potential to change the landscapes as we know nowadays. So, for instance, in big cities, rural areas, if urban air mobility and innovative air mobility becomes a reality, they can change the way we see our skies and this has been identified by EASA as a potential concern towards the social acceptance of this technology.

Clara: So, there's a real opportunity there to improve things in both health and agriculture especially with climate change as we're seeing it now.

Cristina: Yeah, you're right. Drones are complex systems, as you say. And in addition to that, they rely on different subsystems and enabling technologies such as telecommunications, sensors, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, enhanced materials, electronic equipment, etc. And all of these technologies’ elements are embedded in an uncrewed aerial system which includes the telecommunication data link, the ground control stations as well. 

And if we consider a drone as a whole, it can be compared to a chain, which is only as strong as its weakest link. And in aviation, safety, but also security, are two critical elements that must be met in all conditions. So, all the components must be as safe, as secure as possible, including also its power systems, as you mentioned. 

I assume you're asking about batteries, because it's the typical power supply that we think about when a drone comes to our mind. But there are many other fuels that can be used in drones, for example, hydrogen to produce electricity. So this leads me to reply to your questions about the technical challenges. 

Batteries in particular – the performance and longevity can be found in the chemical compounds and compositional materials. Batteries have three main elements, a positive and a negative electrode and an electrolyte. The electrolyte of the battery is the component that transfers ions, the charge carrying particles, back and forth.

So, this battery can produce electricity, right? And most drones nowadays rely on lithium-based electrolytes and chemistry in its batteries. But the thing is that for this sector to blossom, light and durable batteries are a desire. But this thing comes to a contradiction because usually the higher the capacity, the higher the weight of the battery. So, much research is being done in this field to achieve better performance of the batteries. 

And according to some experts, the electrolyte is one of the key components to achieve longer lasting and more powerful batteries beyond lithium-ion batteries. The electrolytes have millions of possible combinations of components and enabling technologies such as supercomputing and artificial intelligence may allow researchers to play with these components and identify the best descriptors or the best characteristics to help the tailored design for various specific use cases and urban air mobility may be one of them.

So, other potential challenges in the field of batteries can be considered, such as making the process of manufacturing cheaper, safer, or also to improve the techniques used to process and recycle them by the end of its useful lifetime, for instance.

Cristina: For sure. We do maintain, in fact, a close relationship with our members. We keep track of their challenges and needs to provide services that can benefit them and their activities and businesses. 

In the drone community, in particular, most of our members are drone services providers. So, there are drone manufacturers as well, also integrators, and we have some test sites in the region. And as mentioned, we focus on SMEs, but especially in the drone ecosystems, we have other kinds of stakeholders, such as public administration and academia. 

Our main objective, as an initiative, is to support the technical emerging sectors to work with. We have SMEs, deep tech emerging companies, and we try to consolidate them in the region through innovation. So, as Drone Community, we tackle the common needs to improve them and contribute to the prosperity of the sector in the region. 

In aeronautics, an aircraft that stays on the ground is not making any profit, but losses. So our objective is to develop a task aligned with the European Drone Strategy that can potentially ease the conditions to fly and simplify the coordination procedures with the administration or improving the user experience of the tools that our members use on a regular basis.

I can mention, in fact, three major milestones we have achieved as a community so far. Most of them are quite recent. So in February this year, Enaire released an improved version of its flight zones tool, Enaire Drones, which includes the new functionalities requested by our members in a workshop that we did in late 2022. 

And this year also in May, we participated at the Territorial Impact Assessment workshop in Brussels, invited by the European Committee of the Regions to feed their opinion, the technical opinion on the new European Drone Strategy 2.0 with our expertise in Catalonia. This opinion, by the way, was voted on and passed and adopted last month, and the European Committee of the regions has it published and available. 

And last but not least I would say that in September, the medical emergency service in Catalonia published a new coordination procedure to ease the coordination of the drone operators near the medical heliports.

This new procedure is being implemented only in Catalonia, so we are quite pioneers in this field, to reduce the coordination thanks to an agreement that the operators virtually have with the Medical Emergency System of Catalonia and well, we're getting to see that it's a good practice that others want to implement in other regions and by other administrations.

So we will get to see, but just to mention a few figures, the workload of the administration and both our SMEs has been reduced quite a lot. So we will get to see its impact on economic terms maybe next year, but it's promising. I mean, it's encouraging to see these new moves and trends in the sector. And partially thanks to our contribution as Digital Catalonia Alliance. 

So, to link this question to the previous one, I must admit that we don't receive much questions or challenges toward the design of an aircraft or its batteries, but it's just because in general there are not many drone manufacturers, either in Spain or in Catalonia, but we do have some of them. And the reason I think we don't receive many questions is because they are already experts in the field of designing drones.

But what recently came out are the needs or the challenges of our SMEs to have some access to computer-aided design tools at a competitive price for them. So, basically licenses adapted for SMEs. And recently I did refer some of our stakeholders to Dassault Systèmes’ team in Barcelona, so they could get to know what you can offer in terms of software for the members of our ecosystem.

Cristina: Yes, indeed. As mentioned, both safety and security are a must have in this industry, and these are in the highest priority for all the stakeholders in this business. There are strict standards and regulations to assess that. Some of them inherited from the aeronautical and aerospace industry.

So the trend of this sector is to increase the number of operations in rural, urban areas and cities. So autonomous and uncrewed vehicles are expected to increase and ultimately to be able to fly autonomously without the human interaction, to provide all sorts of services from different kinds deliver goods, transport people, etc. 

The thing is that today, humans are still pretty much in the loop. It means that when a drone takes off or when it goes somewhere or when it’s time to land, most of the time there's a human involved in this kind of operation. So, in order to achieve these highly automated sorts of operations, humans need to increasingly be out of the loop.

So a human operator will not be necessary to decide how the drone should act or to perform because it will be capable of doing some tasks thanks to artificial intelligence, for example, and this is a concern to the public for sure.

I used to manage the Artificial Intelligence Community in the Digital Catalonia Alliance as well. And we are well aware that there are some new and upcoming artificial intelligence regulations. Artificial intelligence is one of the biggest digital transformations nowadays, and its use in drones can raise concern as well in terms of social acceptance, policymaking, research and also engineering.

As mentioned, drones and eVTOLS have many legal constraints, regulations, certifications. Nowadays, we rely on these remote pilots and they have to do some paperwork in advance of most of the drone operations in order to fly safely, according to the legal framework, and that's because there are other users, other stakeholders, using the sky, such as crewed aviation.

So this makes me go back to the second question because this approach taken by the industry to introduce drones safely in the sky was to segregate them from other users. So crewed aviation flies above 150 meters while drones fly below 120 meters. But what happens around the airports, right?

Airports are a complex environment where you have airplanes taking off and landing. According to the regulations to fly safely, there are some distances and areas, where drones, around these kinds of infrastructure, are excluded or they have some additional constraints to limit their own operations to keep safety.

So to overcome that, in the last few years, research has been focused on the so-called “U-space concept”, which aims to achieve automated unmanned aerial systems traffic management, especially in low-altitude airspace and urban environments, and to safely integrate them in the already existing traffic management in manned aviation.

So U-Space offers this new paradigm, where it's possible to overcome the current segregation of drones and truly integrate them in the airspace, thanks to a set of specific services, systems and procedures that can have been designed to allow a safe, efficient, and also affordable access to a number of complex drone operations based on technical developments with a high degree of digitalization, but also automation.

Cristina: Yes, there are. I will try to summarize this part as much as possible because we could discuss drone regulation for weeks or even days. It is a huge topic to cover. And just to give you an idea of the current situation in Europe: on December 31st, 2020, the European drone regulation entered into force.

This was a huge milestone in the European drone sector because before that, regulation was made at the national level. With this scenario, cross-border operations and international drone operations were extremely difficult. So, this new legal framework allows us to have these kinds of operations in areas where you have a cross border.

Although the drone regulation is made at European level, it is flexible enough to allow member states to regulate their definition of the drone geographical zones, which are portions of airspace where drone operations are facilitated, restricted or excluded according to the situation on the ground.

So upcoming regulations are expected to be done at national level as well. Nevertheless, the European Commission will closely examine how regulations are implemented to ensure harmonized implementation practices or between member states and regions in order to facilitate cross-border operations as mentioned earlier.

So in Spain, the regulation on drone geographical zones is still in draft. So we'll get to see soon, at least in Spain, a new regulation upcoming.

So this year in January, the U-Space regulatory package came into force as well. So, mainly it consists of the European regulation, which establishes the standards procedures for safety of drone operations in U-Space airspace.

And just to sum up, there are some other regulations that must also be considered in the drone sector such as the Electromagnetic Compatibility Directive, or in the communication field, environmental ones... So in the next few years, we may get to see new regulations, for instance, to limit noise or the imminent AI act, for example.

Clara: So it's really interesting that within the European Union, each country basically has its own set of regulations, right – you mentioned the EU wanting to harmonize between member states.

Cristina: Well, in fact, there are some sort of recommendations for drone regulation at worldwide level. So, as mentioned, we have this European common framework, but drone regulations started at the national level, right? 

So many countries have their own regulations. So my piece of advice for those people listening to the podcast is to check whether there are regulations or not in the country they travel to, for instance. In America, for example, the Federal Aviation Administration is in charge of the American drone regulation, which differs a bit from the European one, although they have some similarities.

But still, in many countries, there are no drone regulations at all. So, for this reason, at the international level, the International Aviation Organization, the ICAO developed a regulatory framework for drones that operate outside of instrument flight rules. 

And so what ICAO did in order to develop this document is to review the existing drone regulation in many states, countries, in order to identify the commonalities and best practices that could be consistent with the ICAO aviation framework and a broad range of states could implement them if they don't have any sort of regulation at all. The outcome of this exercise that ICAO did was the ICAO manual of drone regulations titled parts 101, 102, and 149.

Clara: Well, this was really interesting, Cristina. Thank you so much for joining us today. 

Cristina: Thank you for inviting us, it's been a pleasure.

Clara: For our listeners, make sure to stay tuned. Cristina will be joining us again in our next episode. We'll be focusing on public perception, business opportunities for startups, and future trends in drone and eVTOL development. In the meantime, you can find more information on our website, 3ds.com/cloud. Don't forget to subscribe for more insights and stories from our guest experts.