Towards a Tool for Assessing UAS Compliance with the JARUS SORA Guidelines

The Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) legislation in the European Union will expectedly become unified by 2020. This legislation divides UAS operations into three categories, one of which is the Specific category, in which operations of higher risk will be placed. Permission for UAS operations in the Specific category is granted based on a Specific Operations Risk Assessment (SORA). The risk assessment categorizes operations into Specific Assurance and Integrity Levels (SAILs), which determines the level of the requirements for the operation such as operational procedures, training of the remote crew, UAS specification and maintenance etc. However, a conceptual gap exists between the defined technology requirements for UAS and the available UAS platforms. In this work, a prototype assessment tool based on the SORA defined technology requirements has been developed. The tool is a web-based questionnaire, which pulls the questions from a data structure and stores the answers in a database for analysis. Upon completion of the questionnaire, the user receives an automatically generated evaluation report. The evaluation report points out the areas of inadequacy and provides suggestions for mitigating these. The tool in its current state has been used to evaluate four commonly used UAS. The four UAS have been tested for SAIL II through IV, and the results show that only one of the selected UAS complies with SAIL II. Future work is to refine the tool including the list of questions and the UAS evaluation report generator, based on feedback from UAS domain experts and to expand it to cover fixed-wing UAS.