Research should not take place in isolation. Innovation is all about exploring new possibilities, outside of preconceived ideas. Successful business ecosystems are characterized by the free interchange of ideas between different actors that translate into new products and services.
Sometimes this leads to the discovery of derivative applications that were not even considered by the creators of the original technologies.
Why cross-fertilization is important for research projects?
The clearest benefit of cross-fertilization is the identification of redundant areas of research that are being actively pursued by other projects, thus ensuring the most effective use of resources is allocated, reducing wasteful duplication of efforts as much as possible. The main benefits can be summarized as follow:
Optimisation of resources
As mentioned above, cross-fertilisation ensures that resources are not wasted pursuing results that are already available or will become available in the future.
Specify and refine requirements
Other projects could potentially benefit from the ICARUS services and, in return, can provide valuable information to identify requirements that have to be fulfilled for these services to use the relevant ICARUS services.
Validate the approach
Other projects can be considered “use cases” or “early users” of the ICARUS services that complement the validation exercises that will be carried out as part of the ICARUS study.
Cross-promotion
Interaction with other projects provides access to reach other audiences that are not the primary focus of ICARUS and thus increase the outreach of the project
The chosen methodology
To achieve these benefits, the methodology shown in the figure below will be used:
- Identify past and concurrent projects: The first step is to identify which projects are more interesting to our study in terms of the four potential benefits described in the previous section.
- In the case of projects that have already finished it will not be possible to influence them to consider or incorporate our research (thus the validation and cross-promotion benefits are not possible) but they have the advantage that their findings are published and can be analysed to be considered as input by ICARUS.
- In the case of concurrent projects, their objectives and proposed methodologies can be analysed to identify the most promising synergies that can be obtained through cooperating with them.
- Once these synergies have been determined, it will be possible to establish appropriate links with them for interchanging information.
The process of discovery of potentially useful projects should be maintained during the whole lifetime of the project as new projects can be started after the initial analysis
The main projects and documents considered for cross fertilisation with the ICARUS project
| Project name | Relation to ICARUS |
| 5G!drones | Could potentially provide 5G mobile networks as a service enabler for UAS and various supplementary services, among them for CARS. |
| Ampere | Added value of MCDF Galileo Receiver installed on drones for BVLOS operations, Ground obstacle and Terrain Model awareness |
| AMU-LED | AMU-LED will perform Urban Air Mobility demonstrations that constitute clear use cases for the ICARUS services. |
| BUBBLES | BUBBLES could potentially integrate the ICARUS services in their algorithms to improve their separation minima criteria. |
| CARS | The CARS document constitutes a foundation basis for ICARUS. |
| CORUS | The CORUS CONOPS is being used by ICARUS, especially with respect to VLL airspace classification and U-space service classification. |
| CORUS-XUAM | CORUS-XUAM is an VLD (Very Large Demonstration) SESAR JU Project. CORUS-XUAM demonstrations can help to validate the ICARUS concept. |
| DACUS | The ICARUS U-space service will be an essential element in providing safe separation and ensuring that such separation does not compromise avoidance of obstacles on the ground. |
| DELOREAN | Validation report in the urban environment about the performance of EGNSS receivers in presence of strong multipath, scattering or interference. |
| LABYRINTH | LABYRINTH will manage drone swarms. ICARUS would be very useful in ensuring vertical separation of these drones. |
| METROPOLIS | Integration of ICARUS into their validation demonstration would be mutually beneficial. |
| GOF2.0 | GOF20 is an VLD (Very Large Demonstration) SESAR JU Project. GOF2.0 flights can be used as a testbed for the ICARUS concept. |
| RADIUS | RADIUS will investigate an EGNSS-based augmented positioning system to navigate in a complex railway environment, providing useful information about the EGNOS Open Service capabilities and performance. |
| SUGUS | SUGUS is implementing an API for EGNSS services which could be used by the ICARUS services. |
