AURORA is a cross-disciplinary project aiming at linking aeronautical, smart mobility, intelligent systems, urban planning, and citizens’ engagement with industry, authorities and citizens perspectives to foster the adoption of urban air mobility. AURORA primary focuses on emergency-related applications, such as medical emergency services and/or critical mobility infrastructure-related services, where urban air mobility can extend and complement current mobility systems. We believe that applications, where urban air mobility brings added value on top of the existing solutions, have a clear value proposition for the end-user and represent a fruitful path for early urban air mobility services acceptance. However, to get there technological, regulatory, economic, environmental and social challenges still need to be addressed and related gaps bridged. AURORA focuses on bridging these gaps and facilitating the integration of urban air mobility in a safe, secure, quiet and green manner. In more depth, AURORA research and innovation activities aim at implementing the enablers of intelligent urban air mobility for multitude of safety-critical applications in the urban environment. One of the key enablers of the urban air mobility is an intelligent and autonomous self-piloted or UAV capable of autonomous trajectory generation while detecting and avoiding obstacles (both aerial and ground objects) in normal and abnormal conditions. AURORA will focus on the development of intelligent and fail-safe guidance-navigation-control features of unmanned aerial system and augmented manned platform operating in urban environment. This includes, among others, an autonomous and continuous selection of emergency landing sites and automated landing in case of fatal malfunctioning of the unmanned aerial vehicle itself. The use-cases include decision making support to emergency services and insertion and extraction of life support items or victims/first responders at location of incident.

The number of drones in commercial and recreational use is expected to grow significantly within the next years. Currently the most dynamic market is in low flying remotely piloted and autonomous aerial vehicles. In 2016 the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has published three different categories of such drones: an open category, a specific category and a certified category. The MoNIfly project (Mobile-Network Infrastructure for Cooperative Surveillance of Low Flying Drones) targets the open and specific categories by proposing a drone traffic management system based on mobile network infrastructure. The main challenge will be the acceptance of low flying devices by the general public. Therefore innovative solutions must be found, developed and demonstrated to allow safe and society friendly as well as aviation-harmonized drone operations. The MoNIfly concept will enable applications with virtual barriers (so-called geo fence applications) that use static databases as well as high-dynamic update rates to support moving vehicles. This means that the risk of collisions of drones with static obstacles but also other drones or aircraft/helicopters will be greatly reduced. Additionally this concept will allow protection of privacy sensitive areas like private houses/gardens or even scenes of an accident or incident. Another area of operation could be the TV market where during sports events the target of interest (e.g. downhill skier or car racer) would be protected by a fast moving geo-fenced area. The MoNIfly consortium consists of a Mobile Infrastructure provider (Nokia), a drone manufacturer (Aerial Tronics Group), a drone operator (UAV International) and two universities (Royal Military Academy Brussels and TU Braunschweig) with excellent background in current air traffic management and drone operations. The project aims to develop the applications described above and will demonstrate their feasibility in a relevant environment. The goal is to enhance the technology readiness level (TRL) from 2 (technology concept formulated) to a TRL of 4 (technology validated in lab) or 5 (technology validated in relevant environment).

The project deals with two main areas: Drone and Virtual reality. These two areas belongs to new smart technologies (Industry 4.0) with huge potential for further development in many sectors with benefit for European economy and society. These two sectors will contribute in creating new business and jobs, protecting environment and improving the quality of life. Although drones are one of the most innovative technologies with applications in many industries and business, the related profiles of a drone software programmer or drone operator are still not part of the national qualification systems and the required digital skills are not yet taught under the current VET curricula in many EU countries. The same applies to another field with a significant market uptake: the development of virtual reality applications. VR is already one of the top emerging technologies. For this reason, the project aims at tackling skills gaps related to the occupational profile of programmer in the ICT sector, and develops new curricula in both fields that could be easily adapted by VET providers, both within the initial educations and lifelong learning programs. Members of the Digital Skills Alliance wil therefore: - Modernize the existing VET programs by developing new curricula for each of the two fields, - Integrate work based learning into the newly designed VET programs, - Design a joint European qualification standard and certification, thus increasing recognition of qualifications atd European Level and easing professional mobility in the ICT sector, - Cooperation with Member States (CZ, SK, ES, LT, AT, BE - EASA) and all stakeholders, an national instution and body of legislative about new European qualification standards- Improve skills intelligence and provide policy makers with recommendations on the strategy and instruments to adopt in order to efficiently address skills shortages.