The Future of Autonomous Unmanned Aviation: Bridging the Gap Between Technology and Regulation

Abstract

This paper presents a Cyber-Physical approach for placing autonomous UAV operations in current regulatory framework with the associated harmonized standards and current international standardization efforts. Literature research revealed the lack of regulatory viewpoints in scientific research in this field. The autonomous UAV operations were divided into 12 categories where two (1: Disaster Management and Emergency Response and 2: Logistics) were selected for further analysis using Cyber-Physical System (CPS) framework. Following the CPS taxonomy, the layers and processes of the modeled operations were mapped to relevant standards and regulations from a technical complexity viewpoint. The technical requirements in conjunction with airspace requirements revealed the complexity and need for both harmonized standardization and implementation of automated Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM). However, the paper recognizes also some issues with full scale U-Space rollout. Another result of the paper is the need for additional Standard Scenarios (STS) which have potential to lower the cost for entry for UAV market. However, the STSs would most likely require new regulatory UAV classification, which in turn requires harmonized standards. The process for creating a new harmonized standard in the EU is a long process, so new Standard Scenarios would be available only in 2030s. For this reason, the paper proposes using an established CPS framework to enable systematic analysis for research on the field.