CACTUS
Conceptos de vehículos Aéreos en la Ciudad: Transporte, Urbanismo y Seguridad

The project has focused on the definition, design, development, and validation of highly automated systems for managing aerial operations in urban environments, an area where multiple types of traffic converge—UTM and U-Space, Urban Air Mobility (UAM), conventional Air Traffic Management (ATM), and manned emergency operations—which must be integrated under common principles of safety, efficiency, and coordination. The objective has been to move toward an urban ecosystem in which aerial mobility becomes a natural component of the city’s intelligent transportation infrastructure.

Within this framework, the project envisions both manned and unmanned aircraft as intelligent nodes within a distributed network of information and transportation, capable of generating relevant data, collaborating with other systems, and contributing to urban decision-making. This perspective positions aerial vehicles as essential elements of the smart city—not only for transport, surveillance, or emergency missions, but also as mobile sensing platforms that complement information from the urban infrastructure.

To enable this approach, the project has developed open and scalable architectures for acquiring, fusing, exploiting, and visualizing aerial and urban data. These solutions allow real-time processing of information generated by aircraft, support secure sharing among different stakeholders, and provide the capabilities needed to manage complex operations in dynamic environments. The architectures address both tactical processing—close to real time—and the generation of strategic information for medium- and long-term analysis, prediction, and planning.

The project has also delivered significant advances in interaction, visualization, and control methods, integrating techniques from artificial intelligence, context analysis, advanced geospatial visualization, and immersive technologies such as virtual, augmented, and mixed reality. These capabilities allow operators and decision-makers to access complex information intuitively, facilitate the supervision of aerial operations in urban settings, and enable the exploration of scenarios related to resource management, mobility, or public safety. In addition, multimodal interfaces—including gestures, voice, mobile devices, and large-format displays—have been designed to expand the supervision and control capabilities of the U-Space/UAM ecosystem.

The work carried out has enabled the validation of these technologies through demonstrators and practical scenarios, combining high-fidelity simulation with flights conducted in controlled environments. This approach has made it possible to evaluate fleet behavior, planning and coordination processes, strategic and tactical separation algorithms, and integration with urban services across three main domains: multimodal transport, urban planning, and security. The project has also incorporated a hybrid simulator, allowing real-time experimentation with both simulated aircraft and real indoor drones within laboratory settings.

Overall, the project lays the foundations for a safe, interoperable, and fully integrated urban air mobility ecosystem, aligned with European U-Space developments and with emerging needs for coordination between ATM and UAM. Its results contribute to building an urban environment in which drones and automated aircraft can operate reliably, safely, and in a coordinated manner, enabling new services and capabilities for society.