HORIZON 2020 - The Longest Autonomous Flight

AtlantikSolar broke the World record for the longest autonomous flight by a small Unmanned Aerial Vehichle (UAV) ever in July. The sturdy solar powered light aircraft was airborne for 81 hours non-stop facing gusts of wind of 60 km/hour (nearly 40 mph).

Related topics

ICT Research & Innovation Belgium Italy Switzerland Robotics

date: 30/07/2015

Project: Smart collaboration between Humans and g...

acronym: SHERPA and ICARUS

Project coordinator: University of Bologna (SHERPA) and Ecole Royale Militaire – Koninlijke Militaire School (ICARUS)

See also: CORDIS

AtlantikSolar has a potential to vastly improve the prospects of finding a missing person during search and rescues, as it can carry on flying for days without human intervention charging itself during the day and using the stored energy during the night. It has already participated in search and rescue missions within the EU-funded research projects SHERPA and ICARUS. It would also be able to carry out industrial inspections and meteorological observations very efficiently at low cost.

AtlantikSolar has been developed by ETH in Zürich using funding from EU projects ICARUS and SHERPA. Both projects work with different search and rescue scenarios, earthquakes and alpine rescues, using both autonomous ground vehicles and UAVs.

The SHERPA consortium with 10 partners is led by University of Bologna and receives EU funding of up to 8.5 million over 4 years. SHERPA is working on finding and rescuing missing persons in challenging conditions in an Alpine environment and is using both autonomous ground and aerial vehicles. The ICARUS project works with a major earth quake scenario inspired by the earth quakes in Haiti and Aquila and the flooding in Pakistan. It is led by Ecole Royale Militaire – Koninlijke Militaire School of Beligum and has EU funding of 12.5 million euro split between 27 partners.