The High Tech Campus Eindhoven (HTCE) will be one of five living labs for autonomous drones. Serendipity has been engaged for the technical coordination of the field lab.
The field lab is part of the Flying Forward 2020 (FF2020) consortium and ecosystem. This three-year innovation and research project is funded by the European Commission. The FF2020 consortium consists of public and private organisations, universities and international multi-disciplinary teams of experts. These include Digie, EUROUSC Italia, Nalantis, Serendipity, Maastricht University and VERSES.
Several major institutions and organisations have given their support to FF2020. These include the European Space Agency (ESA), chip manufacturer NXP, industrial company VDL, tech companies Microsoft and Nokia and investment fund LUMO Labs.
Five field labs
Five field labs are being rolled out for autonomous drones within the FF2020 project. HTCE will be the first of this series. After the rollout is completed in Eindhoven, the Urban Air Mobility (UAM) infrastructure will be tested at the other four fieldlabs in European Union (EU). These are fieldlabs at the University of Oulu in Finland, the Tartu Science Park in Estonia, Ospedale San Raffaele Milan in Italy and the city of Zaragoza in Spain.
"With the increasing use of drones, flying taxis and autonomous last-mile delivery, we need to prepare ourselves for the future," says Jan-Willem Neggers, Managing Director at HTCE. "When we were approached by LUMA Labs and Serendipity to participate in this project, we saw opportunities as a campus to realise our ambitions. Our innovative campus, with all its tech-savvy people, is the perfect location for developing, testing and rolling out this project."
'The right coordinator'
Neggers calls Serendipity the right technical coordinator for the project. "We would obviously like to know whose drone is flying - from where to where, via what route and at what altitude - just like aeroplanes, but closer to the ground," says Neggers. "Precisely for this reason, we need to make this safe, transparent, traceable and well-regulated. I worked with Jonas from Serendipity(editor's note: Jonas Onland, Managing Partner of Serendipity) last year in preparing for this call. He is the right person to lead us in this new era."
Author: Wouter Hoeffnagel
