Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, commonly known as a ‘drones’, are aircraft without a human pilot on board. Although UAVs were originally used for military applications, their use is rapidly expanding to commercial, scientific, recreational, agricultural, and other applications. Audio Visual (AV) companies use drones extensively for aerial filming and photography.
Ireland was the first country in the world, in 2015, to introduce a mandatory drone register, for all drones weighing more than 1 kg, with more than 12,500 drones registered here by the summer of 2019.
Project Activities
SkyTango have developed an Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) management and workflow solution, based on their experience flying drones, dealing with aviation regulations, clients’ needs and city requirements. Dublin City Council embarked on a nine month research project with SkyTango to explore the potential uses of drone flight coordination software over the Smart Docklands Testbed area.
Impact
The pilot project aims to provide better understanding of drone activity over the city environment:
– By cataloguing the different types of drone requests received by the council,
– Through the exploration of effective centralisation of the application system for drone pilots, and assessing whether this would make operation of drones safer and more transparent, and
– By managing use of the public domain by AV companies, allocating spaces so that only one user is on location at any one time.
