Check out the seminar on the innovative Testbed Air Mobility project, where industry leaders SAAB and Ericsson, along with Swedavia and WASP, collaborate in a dynamic partnership supported by Advanced Digitalisation.
Christian Hedelin, senior vice president and chief strategy officer at SAAB, and a board member of the Advanced Digitalisation program, introduced both the program and the Air Mobility project. The goal is to address the opportunities and challenges of digitalisation and develop applications based on the latest and greatest research through collaboration between industry, the public sector and academia. Panelists Catarina Lindholm, Program Manager for Testbed Air Mobility at Saab, Morgan Lindqvist, Senior Researcher in digital airspace at Ericsson, and Jesper Tordenlid, Project Manager at WASP WARA-PS and senior systems engineer, discussed various aspects of the Air Mobility project. The seminar was facilitated by Fredrik von Essen, process manager for learning and competence at Advanced Digitalisation.
Testing unmanned aircraft in real environments
One important part of air mobility is the airport of the future that combines traditional manned aircraft with unmaned aircrafts.
Catarina Lindholm stressed the fact that the need of transportation will always increase. The airspace is underused, and unmanned aircraft are crucial to meet full efficiency in the air. The testbed gives an opportunity to test the technology in a real setting.
Knowledge spreading is also vital.
Air mobility is an open testbed that welcomes both large and small companies, along with academia, to contribute their projects. The collaborative nature of the testbed encourages the exchange and spread of knowledge among different stakeholders.
The panel highlighted the discrepancy between technical development and regulations concerning air mobility, especially unmanned aircrafts. The technology has come far, and the solutions are here to start using, but the regulation has not kept pace with this. The combination of manned and unmanned aircraft is still not regulated, which means that the technology cannot be used or tested in a larger scale. The regulatory institutions need to meet this issue. Ideally, they would be open to a demonstration of how the projects have worked with security and resilience.
Key factors – collaboration and knowledge sharing
Christian Hedelin summed up the seminar with two reflections.
Firstly, that research and regulations must go hand in hand to accelerate innovation. Secondly, he underscored the significance of projects advancing and broadening knowledge.
Catarina Lindholm also underscored the importance of programs like Advanced Digitalisation and governmental support, emphasizing that a single company alone couldn’t have built the Air Mobility testbed.
Watch the seminar
