Safety requirements for small UAS

In the last years, small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS) have been employed for several kind of civil and military applications such as Search and Rescue (S&R) missions, surveillance and monitoring, smart farming, photogrammetry and topography, media and entertainment. Nowadays, sUAS can be used in critical situations, such as over crowded areas, or in empty scenarios, where ground operators or unaware people could be hit by the sUAS in case of incidents. As a matter of fact, the public safety must not be compromised anyway. Although sUAS should be designed with a high level of reliability, some safety requirements should be added to guarantee no injuries on the human body, in case of impact with the sUAS. Unfortunately, national, European and international regulator authorities have not yet a unique approach to overcome the issue to define unequivocal safety requirements for sUAS. In this paper, an overview of the current problem is provided, followed by the definition of a possible approach to set additional configuration requirements to guarantee people safety.