May 2024 was a very productive month for the Future Needs team. The 2nd 2-day plenary meeting of our SESAR Joint Undertaking project ImAFUSA on the 14th and 15th of May took place in the premises of our project partner, the Municipality of Egaleo (EGK) in Athens, providing the space for fruitful discussions on the topic of social acceptance of Urban Air Mobility or UAM. 

Parallel to presenting our work progress during the plenary meeting, our team engaged actively in the Sound Walk experiments and the UAM acceptance survey of the project, taking place inside the nearby Egaleo Urban Park, and co-organised with a survey measuring public perception of drones via extended questionnaires.

Insights of the plenary meeting

After a warm welcome from our hosting partner, Dimitris Tzempelikos from the Municipality of Egaleo, ISCTE, the ImAFUSA coordinator, has addressed all the project management and financial procedures, including the review process by SESAR, our funding organisation.

Passing the torch to the Future Needs team, Kyriaki Daskaloudi, leader of the dissemination, communication and exploitation activities, presented the progress in all tasks. In her presentation, she provided an overview of the KPIs, the audience growth on all channels, and the impact of the social media campaigns. The meeting was a great opportunity to outline the next steps in communication actions and align with the partners. Events organisation, newsletters, press releases and publications of our project’s research and results in journals and the press, are planned and will be managed by Future Needs during the upcoming months to disseminate the project results. 

Yannis Kitsos, our ImAFUSA project manager, participated in discussions related to the deliverables review, the finalisation of the use cases and the development of the environmental, socioeconomic and safety impact assessment indicators.

Guiding students during the Sound Walk experiments

Parallel to the meeting, Future Needs in collaboration with the Egaleo Municipality, co-organised on-site and supported all Sound Walk experiments that took place in the green oasis of the Egaleo Urban Park, in western Athens,  with more than a hundred University students participating. The Sound Walks were led by the Acoustics Research Centre at the University of Salford (USAL) and the Delft University Faculty of Aerospace Engineering (TU Delft).

Our team was glad to welcome the students and teachers from two Universities, Panteion Uni and the National Technical University of Athens, and one Vocational Study organisation, IEK Egaleo.

The Future Needs team created and distributed their badges to all the participants, informed them of the project and the experiment scope and introduced them to the process, before guiding them through the park. There, the participants had to stop in 6 different locations and listen carefully to various drone flights, conducted by our partners from TU DELFT and the EGK, and answer a respective questionnaire about their emotional reaction to surrounding sounds. 

“An amazing team effort that came together really well and went very smoothly with a minimum of stress despite a lot of moving parts!” – Marc Green, USAL, sound walks leader

Social acceptance survey

Following the sound walks, the students returned to Egaleo Park’s café, to participate in a survey, aimed at defining the social acceptance of drones. The participants provided their views on the current use of drones and their perception of drones’ use in a more complex future scenario where UAM applications will be part of our everyday lives. The survey was created and led by our partner ISCTE (Sophia Κalakou, Helena Almeida and Margarida Lopez) and organised on-site by Future Needs and the Municipality of Egaleo, with their teams introducing the participants to the action, the project and the survey scope, explaining further the questions and solving any arising problems.

Many thanks to the Municipality of Egaleo and Mr Dimitris Tzempelikos for the warm hospitality and collaboration in organising the meeting and the external activities and to all our partners for their contributions to all the activities: ISCTE – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Delft University of Technology & TU Delft,  Aerospace Engineering, AgentFly Technologies, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, S[&]T, ICCS – NTUA, The University of Salford, University of Birmingham, DronePrep.

“Special thanks to all the people involved in the organisation and execution of the pilots, it has been an important milestone for the project and we expect to get our first results out of them!” – Sophia Kalakou, ISCTE, project coordinator

Well-deserved congratulations to all the Future Needs team members who worked on-site or behind the scenes for all the activities organisation; Kyriaki Daskaloudi, Yannis Kitsos, Panos Chatizmathios, Georgia Nikolakopoulou, Yannis Koutsos, George Lyssas, Myrto Giotakou, Akash Mishra and Theodora Papanikolaou, coordinated by Anna Palaiologk,  endorsed and assisted the whole experience with their expertise, efforts and organisation actions.

If you want to learn more about how we can support your project research and educational activities or events, don’t hesitate to contact our team!