Research Is the Layer We Are Building Next

Aerial Grid is in discussions with SUPSI, the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland, on a joint research partnership with the ISIN, the Institute of Information Systems and Networking. We expect to confirm the details in the coming weeks.

The intent on both sides is a standing collaboration rather than a single project with a single deliverable.

Why research, and why now

Low-altitude airspace is filling faster than the means to account for what is in it.

Every airspace system makes claims. This object is a drone. It came from there. It was not authorised. Those claims are easy to make and hard to defend. When an airport closes, when a regulator opens a file, when a case reaches a court, the question is never whether a sensor produced an alert. It is whether the alert can be shown to have been correct.

That gap, between detection and evidence, is a research problem before it is a product problem.

Any vendor can assert accuracy. Independent applied research is how accuracy becomes something a regulator, an insurer or a judge can rely on. That is not a capability a company can credibly award itself.

What we expect it to cover

Scope is still being agreed and may change. Four areas have recurred consistently in the conversations so far.

01 Detection and sensor fusion

Combining radar, RF and further sensing modalities so classification improves and false positives fall. The operational cost of airspace security is driven by false alarms, not by missed detections alone.

02 AI and airspace analytics

Moving from detection to interpretation: classifying behaviour, inferring intent, and separating routine operations from anomalies at city scale.

03 Trusted data and verification

Provenance, auditability and evidence standards. Research into trustworthy data infrastructure and federated data governance bears directly on whether an airspace record survives legal and regulatory challenge.

04 Visualisation and network analytics

Turning a distributed sensor estate into something a control room can act on in seconds. Network-level analysis also surfaces patterns that no single sensor can see.

Why we approached SUPSI

SUPSI is one of the nine universities of applied sciences recognised by the Swiss Confederation. Applied research is its mandate rather than a sideline, and the institution is built to move work from laboratory to deployment. Its base in Ticino sits inside a Swiss drone and robotics ecosystem that is unusually dense for its size.

For a company headquartered in Switzerland and operating internationally, that combination matters. Swiss and European airspace rules are converging on U-space. Research conducted inside that regulatory reality transfers more readily than research conducted outside it.

Where both sides stand

“We can build detection quickly. Building detection that a regulator, an insurer or a court will accept takes longer, and it requires partners who publish their methods and let others test them. That is what we are looking for in this collaboration, and why we want to get the scope right rather than fast. What we hope to build together is the awareness, insight and trust layer between the sky and everyone who depends on it, resting on evidence rather than assertion.”

Dr. Piyush Harsh, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, and Andy Edmonds, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Aerial Grid

“Airspace is becoming a data problem as much as a sensing one. The questions we work on at SUPSI concern how distributed systems produce data that can be trusted, and how that data is made legible to the people who must act on it in seconds. Those questions map closely onto what Aerial Grid has to prove, which is what makes the conversation worth having.”

Dr. Giacomo Inches, Senior Researcher, SUPSI

What happens next

We expect to confirm the partnership and its initial workstreams shortly, and will publish the detail here when we do.

The measure of this work, once it starts, will not be how much airspace we can see. It will be how much of what we say about it can be proven.

Aerial Grid builds Aerial Intelligence infrastructure for low-altitude airspace, giving operators, regulators and cities a verified view of what is flying and why.