TONIC

The rapid rise in the use of unmanned aerial systems presents considerable risks to manned aviation. The situation is particularly critical for low-flying rescue helicopters during low-altitude missions, such as approach maneuvers to accident sites. Smaller, commercial drones operating without active signal transmission (non-cooperative drones) are often impossible for the human eye to detect in time. Spotting such a hazard at the last moment forces the crew to abort the landing approach immediately for safety reasons. Searching for an alternative landing site incurs vital delays and often increases the distance to the incident location, severely compromising the timely delivery of emergency medical care.

To mitigate this threat, the project consortium is developing an airworthy, lightweight, and energy-efficient detection and warning system:

• Multi-Sensor Suite: A compact array of multi-spectral sensors enables reliable DAA (Detect and Avoid) and comprehensive airspace coverage—even under challenging environmental conditions.
• Intelligent Data Processing: Using a combination of conventional logic and data-driven algorithms, sensor signals are processed with low latency and fused into a single object track.
• Predictive Assistance & Cockpit Interface: A mathematical dynamic model calculates critical flight paths in advance and visually alerts the crew in the cockpit. The intuitive human-machine interface actively supports the pilot with predictive avoidance scenarios to guide the helicopter safely around the drone obstacle.

The newly launched project aims to enable early hazard recognition by automatically and precisely detecting non-cooperative drones—well before they become visible to the human eye. A refined visual HMI concept is intended to improve the crew's situational awareness and thus reduce the workload during critical flight phases. Through predictive avoidance routing, the system seeks to defuse collision risks well in advance, thereby avoiding aborted missions and saving vital time during life-saving operations. In doing so, the project lays the foundation for lightweight, modularly integrable Detect and Avoid (DAA) systems in commercial and governmental helicopter operations.