The Swedish Civil Aviation Administration, LFV, is planning on building a test hub at the airport in Örnsköldsvik. The airport, which possesses the world’s first fully remote air control system, is of high interest for LFV and there are now plans for a joint project between LFV, Örnsköldsvik Airport, RISE (Research Institutes of Sweden), FlyPulse and the cooperation Svenska Regionala Flygplatser (Swedish regional airports).
– They breed them tough up there. They are in the forefront when it comes to new technique and dare to try new things, which is something we appreciate and depend upon, Gunnar Olsson, R&I manager at LFV, said in an interview with Tidningen Ångermanland published earlier this week, to explain why Örnsköldsvik Airport is a perfect partner for this project.
The vision is the “Autonomous Airport” and one application area involves the integration of drone solutions in daily airport operations.
– Instead of driving a terrain vehicle for checking the airport fences, electrically powered drones could be used for automatic checking, streaming live video to personnel for supervision. This will save considerable amounts of time and daily vehicle driving and thereby reduce costs and vehicle emissions, says Jonas Didoff, senior advisor at LFV.
RISE Research Institutes of Sweden is leading the project and will contribute with their competences in wireless communications and automation for the drone solution development.
– We need to consider different communication solutions to make sure a certain level of availability and reliability for remote control and data delivery. 5G is one on-going topic which we will have a close look at, especially for use cases at the airports, says Lei Chen, Senior researcher at RISE. In addition, we will also investigate a seamless integration of such a solution in the current daily operation procedure and establish an innovation platform for future advanced intelligent functionalities.
The project will last for 14 months and will have a public demonstration in mid 2019.
