Our drone project has a new name.

Urban Drone Testbed has been the name of our project related to the construction of what we previously called a “drone testbed”. In order to clarify the project’s mission and purpose, we have decided to change the name.

We have realized that what we will focus on is to solve the city specific challenges for regular, safe, secure and sustainable drone traffic in cities. Our ambition is to within existing legislation perform three different kinds of use-cases, a fast, an endurance and a strong one. The fast one will probably be a heart starter, the enduring one will collect data of different kinds, and the third one will be strong and help lifting heavy things in narrow spaces. We will also have to manage with policy challenges, understand how the different roles and responsibilities will need to look in order to enable an open, controlled U-space for different kinds of drone operators.

In order to further these challenges, we need to change the name from Urban Drone Testbed into Stockholm UAM Lab. Drones is something the Swedish Defence Force only are calling hostile UAMs so we had to leave that word. Then the Swedish Transportation Board reacted very negatively to the term testbed because in their world it meant a defined, exclusive and restricted area only for us – which was not the case. They preferred “project” or “lab”. Finally, the Swedish ANSP needed the name to include the term UAM – meaning Urban Air Mobility – since that is what they and all their colleagues, on a global level, are calling the vehicles. And we all want the world to understand where this is happening – hence the new name Stockholm UAM Lab.

We are thrilled to continue working with this project and have very exciting news to share in the near future.