Test of first urban e-commerce deliveries by drone in Helsinki

This year's March saw a first test of delivering goods by drones in Finnish Vantaa. It was one of the first tests at all taking place in an urban environment, even close to an international airport. For the test case, consumers of the Vantaa area were able to get their online-purchased goods delivered by drones. Instead of picking up the parcels in the local K-Markets, they could catch their goods directly at the landing platform called “vertiport” as soon as the drone landed and delivered the parcel. Customers of the service received a message on the time of delivery by drone and could either directly collect them or at a time to their convenience. Deliveries to the vertiport instead of through the K-markets saves the time needed for processing in the stores as well as road transport driven delivery by vans or lorries.

About 100 drone deliveries of parcels up to 1,5 kg covered the distance of 5 km from the Matkahuolto distribution terminal directly next to Helsinki airport to the K-market based vertiport. Flight and landing of the drones was fully automatically with flight control centre some 14 kilometres away supervising the deliveries supported by staff at the vertiports for further monitoring. The advantage of using fixed launch and landing sites for drone deliveries is in eliminiating many of the complex safety issues apparent from door-to-door deliveries in urban environments.

The drone delivery test is part of the Finnish Traffic Lab with its test area Aviapolis dedicated to new and innovative mobility solutions. The testing programme aims to prove the use of drones for cargo deliveries as an efficient and sustainable alternative to road transportation. By testing and providing landing infrastructure for drones, cargo deliveries should become faster, cleaner and more affordable than existing freight deliveries today. And take of some load from many city’s congested roads.

Article published first at www.dronelife.com on 21st of March 2019