first tests also at the San Raffaele in Milan – breaking latest news

According to the results of the Study on the societal acceptance of Urban Air Mobility in Europe, created in 2021 by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), the most useful use of drones and similar aircraft in urban contexts is considered the one for emergencies. In particular, the delivery of medical supplies to hospitals (41%), il transport of wounded (41%) e of first aid doctors (36%) and the disaster management (28%).

In Italy, initiatives in this area are still scarce and experimental. But I believe it,” he says the engineer Alberto Sanna director of Center of Advanced Technologies for Health and Well-Being of the San Raffaele hospital in Milan —. I am convinced that our children will live with the presence of flying drones, as we did with airplanes. It is needed to aggregate resources and skills, which are very fragmented today. The hope of being able to network and create experimentation and development centers that dialogue intensely with each other. Also because the idea of ​​drones carrying medical supplies is popular both in our country and in Europe. And the initiatives for the application of robotics in the medical field, such as medical aid, are multiplying.

The European project

The campaign of practical demonstrations of the European project Horizon 2020 started right at the San Raffaele Flying Forward 2020 developed together with ten other European partners with the aim of creating innovative services for the transport of biomedical material and for security using drones. In the vision of the FF2020 project drones are a part of a vast digital ecosystem in which a multitude of actors participate who contribute to the development of a new form of mobility within cities, an entire ecosystem of cutting-edge logistics and urban mobility. San Raffaele coordinates the five European Living Labs in Milan, Eindhoven, Zaragoza, Tartu and Oulu.

Each of these is faced specific infrastructural, regulatory challenges but also imposed by nature: they are staged practical demonstration models who intend to develop innovation with new urban air technologies at the service of citizens. The European project has already led to creation of the physical and digital infrastructure necessary to develop urban air mobility – i.e. the implementation of innovative solutions for the safe, efficient and sustainable use of drones in urban areas – and is consolidating useful experiences and know-how for the future implementation of these services.

“Live” laboratory

We have already tried to lead the way in the past with us as the lead partner in Europe. Since it is difficult to fly drones due to all the legislative, safety and so on implications, a “living lab” type setting is necessary, says the director of the Center for Advanced Technologies for Health and Well-Being. What does it mean? San Raffaele is a “miniature” city: has all the infrastructures (hospital, cogeneration plant, car parks, shops, hotel, sports fields, heliport, and part of a metropolitan area which in perspective could include a town, Segrate, the Tangenziale Est, the Parco Lambro and Linate airport ndr) and 25,000 people who visit it every day. So we have the opportunity to experiment with certain solutions “live”. In short, we use San Raffaele as living lab of a city of the future for each of our projects. In the case of drones, it’s about demonstrate the technical and organizational feasibility of a transport system in the healthcare sector.

The two experiments

The first demonstration covered the use of drones to transport drugs and biological samples. Healthcare personnel request a drug from the hospital pharmacy and a person in charge places the product in a container anchored to the drone for transport exactly where requested. During the demonstration, the drone took off from an internal courtyard of the hospitaladjacent to the pharmacy deposit, and took the drug to another area of ​​the hospital. In the future this system will connect clinics, pharmacies and laboratories scattered throughout the city and regionfor more flexible, efficient and sustainable transport.

The second demonstration concerned safety inside the hospital and proposes a solution that can be valid for many other realities. In fact, by selecting a point on the hospital map, the security personnel send a drone on site to reconnoitre a dangerous situation. The drone records and transmits the footage in real time to the security personnel who then intervene as required by the situation.

The test result was positive. All this effort allows us to understand if this experimentation could be possible tomorrow suggest best practices to make a challenge credible, feasible and sustainable that instead we would live on the bench, we would inherit from whoever is doing it, underlines engineer Sanna. The demonstration of the technical and organizational feasibility in the two contexts allows us to say that at this point, for example, it will also be possible to use a drone equipped with thermal camera to inspect the coats of hospital buildings to evaluate their energy efficiency.

The complexity of the organization

A complex challenge. To physically carry out these experiments we had to bring together multiple internal and external organizational elements, explains engineer Sanna. Each of the demonstrations was specifically authorized by ENAC (National Civil Aviation Authority), for which the San Raffaele made use of the consultancy of EuroUSC Italia which has extensive experience in regulation, safety and certification in the aviation sector and especially in the drone sector. The European project foresees the integration of different U-space services and the execution of different flights in BVLOS (Beyond Visual Line Of Sight) mode – i.e. not at sight – for which it is necessary to obtain operational authorizations from the UAS (Unmanned Aircraft System) operator.

In this regard, a key role has been played in the development of risk analysis for the operator ABzero, Italian start-up and spin-off of the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa incubated at the Polo Tecnologico di Navacchio, who acted as a drone operator for both demonstrations. In particular, their certified container, equipped with artificial intelligence, called Smart Capsule, been integrated into the intelligent digital system developed by the VERSES project partners. It allows us to achieve greater autonomy by drones in carrying out logistics and monitoring services.

The future: vertiports and drones

The San Raffaele the third of the five Living Labs of the FF2020 project to start practical demonstration models: the High-Tech Campus of Eindhoven and the City Hall of Zaragoza preceded it, each with different use cases but, also these, with the aim of demonstrating how technologies can provide useful services for citizens and organizations . THEThe H2020 Flying Forward 2020 project will end in November 2023. We will now scale up and replicate our experimental activities and continue to coordinate those we have made.

But the European experimentation will serve to understand in which direction the use of drones should (and can) move in the city and in a particular environment such as the hospital. According to engineer Sanna, if one day it will really be appropriate to use drones, it is necessary to foresee that there are more drones. There is a need to have “vertiport”, vertical ports that allow a certain number of drones to take off without interfering with each other and carry out a mission. It is therefore necessary to regulate the airspace, to foresee what will have to happen in any case if and when this evolutionary model of logistics can evolve. Thanks to 5G (next generation technologies and standards for mobile communication, ed) scenarios such as managing swarms of drones, drones that communicate with each other and with a virtual control tower seem complicated but can instead be tackled.

Not only. The real competitive advantage of the drone that of making available a further dimension for process optimization. If it is true that tomorrow they will be used in large numbers, one cannot think of making them perform a single function. We have to imagine a wide variety of services, to be able to break even. Lastly, there is a need to rethink the architecture of buildings in general. You need to have buildings that can interact with drones. So imagine that they may have landing and take-off spaces, for example. Our task is to demonstrate that the use of certain technologies provides a good service, because technology is often experienced as an imposition.

The drone market and healthcare services

According to the estimates reported by the Drone Observatory – Milan Polytechnic School of Management, directed by Paola Olivares, by 2030 the market for services performed with drones in Europe will have a value of over 14.5 billion euros and will create 145,000 new jobs of work. For that date, the Drone Strategy 2.0 Launched on 29 November 2022 by the European Commission, it expects the following drone services to become part of European life by 2030: S
emergency services, mapping, imaging, inspection and surveillance within the applicable legal frameworks by civilian drones, as well as urgent delivery of small shipments, such as biological samples or medicines. Innovative air mobility servicessuch as air taxis, which provide regular transportation services for passengers, initially with a pilot on board, but with the ultimate goal of fully automating operations.

Europe in pole position: gods 120 application cases of services with drones surveyed worldwide by the Drone Observatory, between June 2019 and December 2022, 58 are developed in Europe, 30 in America, 15 in Africa, 12 in Asia and 5 in Oceania. For what concern healthcare transport33% of projects concern medical devices and supplies; il 28% medicinesil 21% blood and biological samples, il 12% swabs and vaccines3% each organs and medical prescriptions.