AW-Drones supports the ongoing EU drone regulatory process, contributing to harmonise EU drone regulation and standards. In order to do so, the project collects technical standards, rules and procedures already developed for the commercial use of drones worldwide. Then, it critically assesses their compliance to existing and foreseen regulations. This leads to the identification of a set of best practices, gaps and bottlenecks, as complete as possible, for the safe use of civilian drones in the EU.

As a result, AW-Drones delivers an yearly state-of-the-art report containing a structured overview of the standards published and under development.

AW-Drones shares the knowledge produced with the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), the National CAAs, and standardization bodies (e.g. EUROCAE, JARUS, ISO…) to contribute to their awareness of the current global drones’ rulemaking and standardization state-of-the-art and “best practices”.

AW-Drones has also produced an Open Repository (alias “metastandard”) of the knowledge collected, available to the drone community. The Drones Standards Information Portal is a powerful tool displaying, in an easily accessible fashion, the technical standards already published or under development for the commercial use of drones worldwide that the project is collecting and assessing against existing and foreseen regulations. Moreover, it contains information on standards’ maturity level, coverage of regulation, and identified gaps.

This web-based tools facilitates the risk assessment and the mitigations implementation for drones operators. Ultimately, AW-Drones will determine which standards constitute Acceptable Means of Compliance (AMC) to one or more OSOs/mitigations. In this sense, it will effectively aid UAS operators by identifying all the standards applicable to every SORA requirement. To facilitate this process, the Drone Standards Information Portal provides information about the standards applicable to a given mitigation deriving from the SORA methodology. For this reason, it is defined as “metastandard”.

AW-Drones represents a great means to clarify the current standardisation landscape and, consequently, fosters the growth of safe drone usage. In fact, it coordinates and accelerates the identification of standards and conformity assessment programs needed to facilitate the safe integration of unmanned aircraft systems into the airspace.