The AiRMOUR project is laying groundwork for European cities to take-off with Urban Air Mobility, especially in the area of Emergency Medical Services. The AiRMOUR project helps to find out which actions need to be taken in the near future by different stakeholders to enable drones on a large scale in Emergency Medical Services. Stakeholders include cities, operators, regulators, research, businesses and the medical sector itself. A total of thirteen partners from six different European countries are involved in this EU’s Horizon 2020 funded project, which will run until the end of 2023.
“Even if the final results of AiRMOUR will come out closer to the project end, our timeline is such that very intriguing results and intermediate findings are emerging already. We are very excited in this way, further contributing to the already lively European discussion on Urban Air Mobility”, says Principal Scientist, Coordinator of the AiRMOUR project Petri Mononen from VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. The project’s first real-life demonstrations will be organised in the autumn, to validate the research work. Drone transportation of medical products and Emergency Medical Services personnel (via test dummies) will be tested in Stavanger (Norway), Helsinki (Finland) and Kassel (Germany). In Luxembourg and Dubai the testing will be carried out as a simulation. Urban Air Mobility GIS tool developed for city planners
The main outputs of the project will be an Urban Air Mobility (UAM) Training Programme for cities and other stakeholders (starting later this year), UAM Integration Guidebook and UAM GIS tool. The GIS tool assists city planners and decision makers to visualise combined ground and air data such as noise, nature protection, no-fly zones and mobility hotspots. “Being able to visualise the impact increases the understanding and allows for more fact-based decision making. It helps city planners and decision makers to think in three dimensions”, says Country Manager Germany Benoît Larrouturou from the AiRMOUR partner Robots Expert. Over 1000 citizens involved in the drone acceptance survey During this spring, AiRMOUR gathers opinions from stakeholders and the public on the acceptance and socio-economic impacts of Urban Air Mobility and its potential to support Emergency Medical Services. The survey will engage over 1000 participants in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Netherlands, Luxembourg and Germany. The results will be published in June on the AiRMOUR website and social media.The aim is for the survey to be repeated during the real-life demonstrations and also to be rolled out in AiRMOUR Replicator Cities for a wider outreach. ”The survey includes questions related to topics investigated as part of this project including privacy, safety and risk, noise and visual pollution and acceptance of different Emergency Medical Services use cases. We are excited to see how our results will compare to for example those of last year’s wide EASA survey on the same topic”, says Senior Consultant Lucy Mascarenhas from the AiRMOUR partner LuxMobility.