Their ability to access challenging environments, provide real-time data, and perform tasks autonomously minimizes risks to human workers in hazardous areas. With advanced features like automated navigation, remote monitoring, and adaptive technologies, drones ensure precision and reduce the need for manual intervention in dangerous scenarios.

By integrating innovations such as AI, machine learning, and cutting-edge sensors, drones are reshaping safety protocols in sectors from infrastructure inspections to emergency response. These advancements enable safer operations, mitigate potential hazards, and enhance decision-making capabilities.

Continuing our Safety and Sustainability Across Europe series, we will explore how some companies and organizations use drones to improve safety across the continent.

Drones for Safety

With approximately two million bridges and a railway network of around 124,000 miles spanning across Europe, ensuring the integrity of transport infrastructures can be tricky, and cracks or faults can easily be missed, leading to disasters. From 2020 to 2023, the $3.6M EU-funded research project Drones4Safety (D4S) set out to build a cooperative, autonomous, operating drone system to remove safety, cost, and accuracy limitations that railways and bridge inspections present.

Coordinated by Emad Samuel Malki Ebeid, an associate professor at the University of Southern Denmark, and nine partners across Europe, the team’s proposed system aims to inspect the whole European electrical railway system and a big portion of the European bridges. To achieve that, the system leverages swarms of drones to monitor infrastructure and report back. However, to keep flying for as long as needed, the drones will recharge their batteries directly on railway cables and power line cables, since 71% of Europe’s bridges are within three kilometers of the latter.

"I believe that we can have the first commercial drones capable of self-recharging on high-voltage lines ready in three, maybe four years," Ebeid commented. “This will be the stepping stone towards the creation of various applications in which the drones operate autonomously and deliver data remotely to the infrastructure operators. Building such software services may take a year.”

All deliverable reports produced during the project are available to anyone, for free.

Parachuting Drones

Founded in 2014 in Be’er Sheva, Israel, ParaZero is well-known for developing and manufacturing smart, autonomous parachute systems to enhance operational safety and mitigate risks. Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and big data analytics to perform real-time data analysis, the ParaZero SafeAir system sets new standards in operational efficiency and reliability and enables organizations to benefit from regulatory approvals for advanced use cases, such as drone delivery, operations over people, and beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) flights.

By using independent sensors to constantly monitor and analyze the drone’s flight data and flight patterns, ParaZero’s SafeAir immediately identifies critical drone failures. In case of doing so, it triggers a series of safety measures to ensure the safety of the drone falling: first, it cuts the power to the motors, then it deploys the parachute and sounds an alarm. After the drone lands safely, it creates a post-flight report to analyze the incident using data stored in the black box.

Recently, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) granted ParaZero a Design Verification Report (DVR) for its SafeAir M-300 and SafeAir M-350 Proparachute safety kits. This confirms both systems comply with key safety requirements, enabling drone operators to enhance their operational scope under the Specific Operations Risk Assessment (SORA) process, and making it a trusted solution for drone operations throughout Europe, ensuring safer, more versatile missions for commercial operators.

Sea Rescues

In collaboration with the Swedish Sea Rescue Society, Remote Aero, a Swedish drone service provider, developed two drone solutions to transform sea rescue operations and support the Swedish Sea Rescue Society, a non-governmental organization operating 230 rescue vehicles at 74 rescue stations. The first focused on conceptualizing and testing smart and safe landing software to enable automatic into-wind landings, reduce ground speed, as well as minimize risks for both personnel and the rescue vehicle. The second explored a novel wide-field electro-optical system to deliver real-time imagery to the operator without adding complexity or weight to the drone, improving both efficiency and safety in rescue operations.

After a three-day demonstration activity in the archipelago of Gothenburg, Remote Aero successfully confirmed that using drone technology for sea rescues can lead to improvements in efficiency, safety, and cost-effectiveness. By reducing ground speed by the wind speed (between 10% to 80%), the smart landing software solution helped to minimize risks for ground personnel, lowered the possibility of vehicle damage, and allowed rescue teams to operate in more challenging weather conditions without increased risk. Moreover, the wide-field electro-optical system helped to speed up decision-making, enable more accurate rescue efforts, and reduce response times, enhancing the safety of both rescue personnel and individuals in distress.

Remote radiation detection and localization

Charged, on behalf of the government, with the mission to clean up the UK’s earliest nuclear sites safely, securely, and cost-effectively, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) is leveraging drone technology to help in the process. One of the 17 sites, Sellafield, a large nuclear power plant on the Cumbrian coast, already has a drone fleet of more than 20 drones, and around 20 remote pilots, conducting more than 200 flights annually.

Since the team at Sellafield deals frequently with contamination and newly radioactive materials or radiation itself, one of the drones the team adopted last year was the Elios 3 RAD. Designed specifically for remote radiation detection and localization, the Elios drone, in an initial test with Flyability and Coptrz, successfully detected elevated doses of radiation and even high-sealed sources in a separate room.

“Safety is improved by being able to send a drone into environments and either do a pre-survey to test radiation levels before we enter, or it can be used to access contaminated environments quickly,” said Amanda Smith, the lead of the UAV equipment program at Sellafield. “We can streamline safety inspections by using drones, and in cases where we use drones to scout an area before a person, we have better situational awareness. This can help us avoid a person going into an area unnecessarily, freeing up operatives for higher priority projects and helping boost safety.”