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Pressure sensor

June 11, 2020 by valentin

Pressure sensors allow the drones to stabilize in the atmosphere.
They can, for example, take atmospheric pressure measurements at regular frequencies and at different GPS altitudes in order to refine weather forecasts.

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No more piloting license required or filing for an exemption which was a lengthy process for all parts. We should therefore see more and more drones flying around for commercial purposes, due to regulations flexibility, the pressure of businesses willing to use drones to deliver high value services (remember Amazon’s proposal for air traffic segmentation?) and the emergence of UAV ecosystem players coalition pushing for the multiplication of usage, there is no doubt that drones will become easier and easier to fly in the skies.   Safety and robustness Having an increasing number of UAVs above our heads is fine, as long as they don’t harm anyone, and this is a major society concern. Beyond privacy, you might remember the nearly fatal drone fall during the Ski World Championship last winter, falling right behind a skier on the slopes. Drones have been forbidden to fly in Rio around the Olympic games areas. 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In a fully autonomous system, a compass’ failure induces the drone to perform fast and large circles (called toilet bowl effect) leading to serious crash and potential damages. The same observations can be made when a motor is getting lost on the system, when a propeller is broken, when any other sensors is not perfectly working. Truly autonomous systems need to rely on sensors and have capabilities to counter-act in case of sensors failure. Sensors and material limitations are one component to master in the development of a safe device, unfortunately they are not the only items that can go wrong on an autonomous system, that’s why we took it to the next level.   Risk analysis – anticipating the worst case scenario At the origin of the development, we built a risk analysis matrix, with a description of the risk, the likeliness to happen, the consequences of it happening to make the inventory of all possible safety issues a user can encounter. 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