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Poutanet helps digitalizing the Helsinki-East Aerodrome and shaping the future of unmanned aviation

Writer's picture: Heikki AlmayHeikki Almay

As part of the LUT University led Carewings-5G project Poutanet is addressing the challenges of enabling automated airfields suitable for handling a growing number of increasingly powerful and intelligent drones. 


Drones were once one of the promising 5G use cases. Five years ago, still at major telco vendor, we predicted the air space to be filled with drones busy delivering goods, doing all sorts of inspections, collecting data and used widely for surveillance. As high reliability and low latency (but perhaps not full URLLC support) were listed as requirements it was expected that unmanned aviation would not take off immediately with the 5G rollouts – but a few years later.   


When looking out of the window now the sky looks quite empty and the use of 5G for connecting drones is still far from being mainstream. Five years of local delivery drone piloting has resulted in a lot of nice YouTube videos and press releases – but scaling those projects has turned out to be difficult. Missing or prohibitive regulations entrenched old practices and rapidly evolving but still far from perfect drone capabilities have slowed down progress.


But don’t close the curtains yet.


At the same time, there are drones dropping grenades, attacking factories, directing artillery fire and piercing tanks while others do the video shooting for the propaganda. Many of these devices operate autonomously. There are drones forming swarms and specialist drones providing extended communications services to others. Technology development happens at lightning speed.


While we sincerely hope that the above new drone capabilities are not used for spreading death and suffering anywhere near you, we expect that the technical advances will be seen soon in civilian use for saving lives and improving services. 

The future begins at the airport


Unmanned aviation would be much easier if there were no legacy airplanes and helicopters, but there are. Airspace is heavily regulated, and safety comes first. As greenfield deployments are not possible, we must squeeze drones into the existing aviation ecosystem. You need drone corridors, integration or interworking with existing flight control and changes in legislation. If you look for people and organizations with capabilities and skills to move the needle you end up at the airport. Carewings-5G focuses on digitalizing Helsinki-East Aerodrome.


At the airport 5G SA plays a significant role. It is the enabler for a flexible setup of sensors and other connected equipment and for automation and remote control. Once the integration is done it can be easily replicated to other airports – and that is the target of our project.

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