UK air traffic tech firm uses Hedera Hashgraph to track drones

Hedera’s public ledger consensus service was recently used to “gather, store, and order” millions of data points in a drone data trial sponsored by the United Kingdom government.

As per an announcement, Hedera worked with Neuron Innovations, a London-based aviation technology company, to trial safe sharing of long-distance airspace by commercial, military, and government drones.

Neuron has implemented an “aviation surveillance as a service” system to allow drones to seamlessly join existing air traffic. The aviation tech firm then utilized Hedera Network’s Hedera Consensus Service to “gather, store, and order” drone data. Neuron CEO Niall Greenwood said:

“We have made unmanned, long distance drone travel possible using safety-critical aviation infrastructure. Each flight creates millions of data points, which no other public ledger has been fast enough to log and correctly order.” 

The multi-drone trial was held in Port Montrose, Scotland, and Cranfield University in Bedfordshire in April and October of 2021. The Neuron sensors recorded data points concerning the drones’ locations and direction while the Hedera Consensus Service logged and timestamped the data collected from each drone on its decentralized public ledger.

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The experiment, backed by the U.K. Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, was one of a number of drone-related tests. The main finding from the study was that it was possible to follow unmanned aircraft after they had passed out of view.

Hedera Hashgraph is a high-security, public distributed ledger technology network based on a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm. The proof-of-concept, which demonstrates that a certain procedure or concept is feasible, utilizes the Hedera Consensus Service and the Hedera Token Service.

Hedera Hashgraph has established a number of collaborations to apply blockchain technology in real-world applications across several sectors. In November 2021, Cointelegraph reported that the Hedera Council partnered with ServiceNow, a cloud-based digital workflow platform, to integrate the Now Platform and create a new degree of trust and responsibility in digital transactions.