Signing of the agreement between the UPC and the Medical Emergency System to develop a drone management platform.

The signing of the agreement was formalized by the rector of UPC, Daniel Crespo, and the director of SEM, Anna Fontquerni i Gorchs, accompanied by SEM's Medical Director, Jorge Morales; the Head of Specialized and Extraordinary Services, Joan Carles Gómez; and the professor from the School of Telecommunications and Aerospace Engineering of Castelldefels (EETAC), Enric Pastor, a researcher at the Drone Laboratory of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya - BarcelonaTech (UPC), among other institutional representatives.

Catalonia has around a hundred aeronautical infrastructures, including airports, heliports, and small airfields, managed by various agencies and entities. Any drone operation requires coordination between the managers of these infrastructures and the drone operator to regulate airspace usage and ensure operational safety.

This coordination is complex for various reasons, such as managing multiple simultaneous operations, the large volume of requests, or the need to improve communication mechanisms. Therefore, it is necessary to digitize and automate the coordination processes required by the regulatory framework for drones.

In this context, SEM is responsible for managing the coordination of all drone flights occurring around the 18 medical heliports in Catalonia where it operates a medicalized helicopter. The goal is to ensure that there is no interference with its operations or those of any other service using the same infrastructure (Catalonia’s Fire Department, Maritime Rescue, or law enforcement agencies).

The exponential growth of the drone sector in Catalonia in recent years has created a need to increase control and security over drone operations within the airspace. It is within this framework that the research group Intelligent Communications and Avionics for Robust Unmanned Aerial Systems (ICARUS) at UPC, which has extensive experience in the field of unmanned vehicles and operates the Drone Laboratory, is developing a technological platform to digitize and automate drone coordination processes.

The technology designed by ICARUS is a pioneering research infrastructure in this field, aimed at minimizing the number of required actions, maximizing access to information, automating processes, and maintaining a high level of flexibility to support the broadest possible coordination scenarios.

In addition to collaborating on research and technological innovation projects related to drones, the agreement also envisions collaboration between EETAC's Drone Laboratory at UPC and SEM on other related research and innovation projects. The UPC Drone Laboratory specializes in mobile communications in the drone sector and in the automation of operations and services based on U-space integration.