The civil use of small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS): operational and safety challenges

guarantee the performance of Dangerous, Dull, Duly and Dirty missions, according to the 4D rule. At the same time, some ethical, operational and safety challenges occur, due to the use of sUAS over crowded areas or in emergency scenarios. The unmanned vehicles are nowadays applied for different kind of applications. Search and rescue (S&R) missions, the surveillance and the monitoring of the terrain, like after natural disasters, such as earthquakes and landslides, the transport of medical equipment and cartography are only some examples of the most renowned and important civil missions of a sUAS. In all these scenarios, some challenges could happen. First of all, the use of sUAS could compromise the privacy of unaware citizens that are in the area of application. Moreover, even if the unmanned vehicle works according to the national and international regulations, there are some hazards both for the ground operators and for the population, because the sUAS could hit the human body after a failure in flight. In this paper, an overview of the Italian and European regulations will be presented. Moreover, some strategic configuration elements will be analyzed to improve them to define safe and inoffensive the sUAS