Drones, UAV’s and RPAS are rapidly gaining in popularity and becoming widespread in our society. It is critical to think about drone safety now as these technologies get off the ground.
Drones are currently used for cinematography, emergency and first response, medical supply deliveries, mapping, security monitoring, agricultural spraying, infrastructure inspections, light shows, and competitive racing. Naturally, drone safety is of concern especially when operating near people, critical structures, moving traffic or in controlled airspaces. When operations over people (OOP) is planned, inadvertent contact with humans on the ground can cause impact trauma and lacerations. For these reasons, civil aviation authorities (CAA) worldwide have imposed regulations to address drone registration/ID, operating and flight parameter restrictions, and safety performance assessments. Risk based approaches, such as the European JARUS guidelines on SORA can be used to assess safety risk based on operating and flight characteristics while other countries impose performance-based assessments such as the Canadian Advisory Circular AC 922 by Transport Canada or the United States regulation Part 107 by the FAA to address OOP.
Biokinetics has decades of expertise in injury biomechanics and crash testing to provide engineering guidance and evaluation of drone technologies whether it is related to penetrating, lacerating or blunt trauma to the general or specific population. Biokinetics’ Drone Safety Lab (DSL) helps drone manufacturers, aftermarket suppliers and operators meet the latest CAA safety requirements.
