Safety and degraded mode in civilian applications of unmanned aerial systems

Business Insider in the drone report clearly states that the market for commercial/civil drones will grow at a compound annual grow rate of 19% between 2015 and 2020. The ample availability of affordable drones is leading to large amounts of drones being sold for civilian uses, especially when drones are equipped with high quality cameras and many other sensors which make them adaptable to a variable set of civilian ( and not always noble) applications. The large increase in the number of drones entering the airspace is leading to real concerns about safety and security issues; and small incidents are more and more frequent. The causes are twofold. From one hand the unmanned inherent nature of drones involves a less maintained and consequently less reliable properties than manned aircrafts. From the other hand, civilian drones are piloted by amateurs with no particular experiences/backgrounds. In this paper, we analyze the existing state of the art and real use cases to identify the key factors involved in safety issues for UASs in civilian applications, we also propose our early work on 3D simulation involving UASs and other interacting devices for specific applications such as Industry 4.0 and smart factories.