ICAERUS: Supporting sectoral and societal drone usage in Europe

Introducing ICAERUS (Innovation and Capacity building in Agricultural Environmental and Rural UAV Services).

Project funded by Horizon Europe and Innovate UK.

Academic team: Giacomo Carli, Jie Deng, Despoina Filiou and Kristen Reid.

The ICAERUS Project is a four-year initiative focused on expanding the use of drones in agriculture, forestry, and rural areas across Europe. Funded by Horizon Europe, this project aims to support agricultural communities and various stakeholders, including private sector entities and public organizations involved in policy-making and funding for innovation.

ICAERUS encompasses four key activity areas: research; development and demonstration; education and training; and scaling-up.

ICAERUS adopts an "application-oriented" approach by selecting five specific drone applications: crop monitoring, drone spraying, livestock monitoring, rural logistics and forestry and biodiversity. The aim is to leverage the versatile potential of drones for agricultural production, forestry, and rural community support. These five chosen applications represent the most significant sectoral and societal uses of drones across Europe.

Crop monitoring - Use drones for plant stress identification, weed detection and 3D canopy reconstruction. Develop decision support system.

Drone spraying - Test and assess drone spraying conditions, compare efficiency and environmental impact between drone and conventional spraying.

Livestock monitoring - Assess the labour-reduction capabilities of drone-based herd monitoring for different grazing cattle and sheep systems.

Rural logistics - Design and develop an innovative drone-delivery fleet management system and integrate state-of the art technologies to automate drone navigation operations.

Forestry and biodiversity - Use drones to monitor forest health, eco-systems, assess biodiversity and identify and inspect high fire risk areas.

The OU team leads Work Package 4 - Capacity Building and Value-Added Services and the social component of Task 3.3 “Socio-economic & Environmental Impact Assessment” from Work Package 3. The team members include Giacomo Carli (Principal Investigator), Kristen Reid, Jie Deng and Maria Fernandez who met project partners from across Europe for the annual meeting of the ICAERUS Project Consortium Meeting on campus in Milton Keynes in 27 - 28 June 2024. ICAERUS is part of the OU Rural Economy Cluster.

The content generated through the ICAERUS project, including this course from the ICAERUS Academy and SEIA results, is displayed at the top of figure below.

An eight-week online training course, hosted on OpenLearn and covering eight unique topics, is currently being developed as part of the ‘ICAERUS Academy’— select this link to Developing business ideas for drone technologies for more course details, and week one for the ICAERUS project. Set to launch by the end of 2024, the course aims to build foundational skills for developing business ideas related to drone technologies. It provides an introduction to the drone industry and explores the various technologies developed within the ICAERUS project. Participants will have the opportunity to gain skills in identifying business ideas and mapping out the stakeholders who can help bring these ideas to fruition.

The social assessment deployed the Technology Acceptance Model to evaluate the factors influencing the decision to adopt drone technologies. An online survey has been designed and will be distributed at Project’s demonstration events across Europe.