City Fly

Due to ever-dropping production costs of unmanned aerial vehicles, sensor and actuator equipment, but also recent theoretical and technological advancements, various technologies dealing with Flying Vehicles (FV) have become accessible by a wide range of industrial and private usage. This amazing technology that opens the possibilities for a whole new paradigm of city traffic, imposes major social, psychological, ethical, environmental, legal, economic, organizational, architectural, safety, privacy and of course technological issues that have to be considered in order to establish well founded policies for city traffic management. The aim of the proposed transdisciplinary project is to address these issues by providing policy makers and citizens with open and accessible tools and needed knowledge that shall contribute towards a sustainable Smart City Aerial Traffic (SCAT) infrastructure. The rules of conduct in 3D space can be divided into: the 2D roads, 3D space below 300 meters above the ground and 3D space at least 300 meters above the ground. When a FV is flying in the second layer in most cases there are no rules for it how to behave. Thus, CityFly will develop a hierarchical rule-based (legal and technical) policy framework for traffic behaviour that will allow FVs to understand the rules of conduct in SCAT. Due to the transdisciplinary nature of CityFly project and the complex socio-technical system to be analysed, the research methods to be employed are likewise transdisciplinary and complex. Each of the three research related work packages (eyes, minds, hearts) will employ adequate methodology that particularly suits the needs of the given perspective on SoFV