SAPERE – Aerospace service for metropolitan areas

Space and aerial earth observation is being more and more exploited to improve effectiveness of Smart City Management.

In the project SAPERE – Aerospace service for metropolitan areas (co-funded by Regione Puglia, Avviso INNOLABS – Soluzioni innovative per problemi di rilevanza sociale, Fondo Europeo di Sviluppo Regionale, POR Puglia FESR-FSE 2014-2020 Asse I – Azione 1.4.b), Distretto Tecnologico Aerospaziale (DTA) is coordinating 3 Work Groups focused on ‘urban infrastructure and sea’, ‘Urban development and soil sailing’, ‘services for drones’.

WGs are implementing living lab methodologies: co-design and co-development among researchers (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerca, Università di Bari), industrial operators (Planetek, Leonardo), end users (Municipality of Bari and professional operators) and public institutions. In the ‘services for drones’ WG, D-Flight, Italian U-space service provider, was invited to take part to bring experience and take users’ problems and needs.

Public administrators of Bari are pressed to manage effectively, orderly, consistently social and economic development of the smart city, indeed updated, precise and timely knowledge of the urban condition and data collected from satellite or from drones makes all operators aware of the same urban situation, reduces PA process time and costs, enables persons to make decisions based on actual conditions, and, in the future, promises to automate part of the decision making process.

In the SAPERE project several urban areas are considered for further analysis: large public/private construction sites whose regular development is in the highest interest of the urban community, areas were illegal acts (blazes) are more frequent, natural parks, sea and beaches.

While space data are very simple to obtain and exploit (from Copernicus constellation or others), the use of drones requires a lot of effort in term of drone management, authorization achievement, data management. Barriers and problems of Municipal police (that manages a drone fleet) were elicited to bring this experience toward CAA and other stakeholders.

IN the next months, the 3 WGs will be more focused on the co-development phase, prototypes will specialized and customized on users’ context, problem, needs, requirement and in the last phase of the project prototypes will be tested by end users.