A Comprehensive Approach for the Safety Analysis of Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems

In the last years, RPAS (Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems) have found wider application in different kinds of civil missions and according to the most recent market analysis, RPAS will have an exponential growth in the future. The outstanding development and application of the unmanned configurations must not ignore the public safety. When RPAS are applied in critical scenarios, the vehicle has a high probability to impact with the human body in case of accident with it, due to the high density of population of the area. The paper deals with a feasibility study about the possible use of automotive methodologies to analyze the impact between the RPAS and the human body. The main automotive methodologies will be taken into account and applied to RPAS to study the severity of the impact. These methodologies are recognized by the most important regulatory authorities in the automotive field and they are used to both verify and certify new vehicles, but they can be only partially applied to unmanned configurations. As it will be reported at the end of the paper, these methodologies have some limitations when applied to RPAS because the impact scenario itself cannot be directly compared to an automotive accident. Therefore, some modifications must be introduced to define an innovative methodology that allow the certification of harmless and safe RPAS.