Coventry City Council teamed up with Skyfarer, Midlands Aerospace Alliance, VESOS Solutions and HAAS Alert to demonstrate the benefits of drones, by demonstrating how a drone can deliver ‘first eyes’ on a vehicle collision.
Delegates at the Local Council Road Infrastructure Group (LCRIG) Innovation & Learning Festival saw how a drone can accelerate and refine the response to an automated eCall from a vehicle involved in an incident.
eCall automatically raises the alarm in eCall-equipped vehicles when the airbags are deployed in a crash. It can also be manually activated by the driver or passenger by pressing the eCall SOS button. An alert includes vehicle type and how many people on board. It’s been installed in all newly approved cars and vans across the UK and Europe since 2018.
Once an eCall alert is received, the drone can fly to the location defined by eCall and transmit live pictures to blue light services and the local transport control centre. This allows emergency services to decide what resources to deploy based on what they see, as well as the data from the vehicle. The images also allow highway operators to better plan their traffic management response.
In November 2022, the UK Government awarded Coventry City Council a grant of £268,175 via the Regulators’ Pioneer Fund to deliver Drone Ready Cities, which started in September 2023. The RPF is a grant-based fund to enable UK regulators and local authorities to help create a UK regulatory environment that encourages business innovation and investment. The current £12m round is being delivered by the Department of Science, Innovation & Technology.
Coventry City Council, partnered with the Midlands Aerospace Alliance, is working to remove non-aviation regulatory barriers to the realisation of the value of urban drone use. As part of the programme, a draft regulatory framework has already been made accessible at https://www.midlandsaerospace.org.uk/projects/drone-ready-cities. This can encourage local authorities on their own journey to being drone-ready.
Skyfarer Ltd who supplied and operated the drone at the live demonstration, is dedicated to revolutionising drone technology to create impactful solutions for society. The specialist eCall consultancy and software company VESOS Solutions played an essential role in passing the data from a vehicle’s eCall automated alert system to direct a drone to the scene of a road incident.
In addition to tailoring the emergency response, it was demonstrated how in the future motorists could benefit with data from the eCall alert being forwarded through HAAS Alert to connected vehicles.
Sunil Budhdeo from Coventry City Council explained: “We get a truer picture of what the incident is like – if it’s going to be a six-hour closure, then we can put that network plan in process put the diversions in process gives us an opportunity to make sure that we’re ahead of the game. We can work in partnership with all the emergency services highways agencies, local councils, who do we need to send out. That triage service is going to be absolutely brilliant in helping us meet some of our net zero targets”. Merging two projects Coventry are engaged in (SCALE and DRS) showed how collaboration works well to make innovation become “Business as Usual”, This demonstration show cased the future urban road and air mobility coming together.
VESOS co-founder Andy Graham added: “It beams pictures back to all interested control rooms and could also beam pictures to emergency services en route on their phones. We already know some things about the vehicle, its type, and how many people on board, but actually getting pictures from it is the extra golden nugget for emergency services and for traffic operators.”
VESOS is the first service dedicated to analysing and processing eCall data to create validated incident alerts. It also consults on implementation and business cases for eCall, as well as giving strategic advice and data analysis.
(Picture – Skyfarer/VESOS)
