With a surface area of 1,000 square metres (20 by 50 metres) and 14 steel columns, each standing 15 metres tall, the University of Klagenfurt’s drone arena is an impressive structure – and probably the largest of its kind in the world. The arena was established to test new technologies, particularly with regard to GPS interference and meteorological factors, outside the existing indoor drone hall, to collect relevant data, and to develop innovative approaches. The arena is equipped with a Qualisys motion capture camera system to track and study autonomous flight activities. Motion capture serves as so-called ground truth. “This system allows us to test algorithms in a realistic environment. Because we assume that many of our applications will involve drones being deployed outdoors, for example in forests or disaster areas, it is important that we now have access to an outdoor infrastructure – with the usual effects of wind, cold, heat, fog, etc. ,” explains Stephan Weiss, head of the Control of Networked Systems research group, and the initiator of the project ODSA. The drone arena site also features two containers equipped with evaluation computers, AI infrastructure and workspaces for drone researchers.

The construction work on the drone airfield, which is enclosed by a net, was carried out by Lakeside Science & Technology Park, which is also home to the drone arena. Bernhard Lamprecht, managing director of Lakeside Park, sees the ODSA at the University of Klagenfurt as an important addition to the technology park: „The implementation of the drone arena by Lakeside Park demonstrates how consistently we support forward-looking technologies at this location. Our central aim is to give excellent research the space it needs to produce innovations with international appeal, while at the same time offering companies the opportunity to develop further in this research and development area of the future. The new drone arena sends a clear signal in this regard.“

The ODSA project was (co-)financed by funds from the Federal Ministry for Women, Science and Research, the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), and the European Union, which were raised for the project by the Control of Networked Systems research group.

Researchers at the University of Klagenfurt have been working on new technologies to improve the use of drones since 2008. The focus here is on developing multi-drone systems in which several drones navigate autonomously, coordinate themselves independently and exchange data. The vision is for swarms of drones to perform tasks in a similar way to a flock of birds, without the need for central programming. One major challenge is camera-based navigation, which enables drones to form a picture of their surroundings and thus orient themselves in areas without GPS. The drone technologies developed in Klagenfurt have a wide range of applications: they are used by the Red Cross and fire services, in industrial environments or by shipping companies for ship maintenance, forest inventory or under Mars-like conditions in analogue space missions.

This research is bundled at Dronehub Klagenfurt. Four research groups contribute to this: Control of Networked Systems (led by Stephan Weiss, Jan Steinbrener, Yannick Morel), Mobile Systems (led by Christian Bettstetter), Pervasive Computing (led by Bernhard Rinner) und Multimedia Communication (led by Christian Timmerer).