Drone Test Center Opens in Amsterdam

Drone test center

An urban test cen­ter for urban drone expe­ri­ence will be set up in the cen­ter of Ams­ter­dam, the Nether­lands, Traf­fic and Trans­port’s Sharon Dijks­ma said dur­ing the open­ing of Ams­ter­dam Drone Week 2020. The goal is to get more expe­ri­ence in the field of drone con­trol over the urban envi­ron­ment.

Amsterdam Drone Lab

The new test cen­ter will be called “Ams­ter­dam Drone Lab” and will be deployed on the ter­ri­to­ry of Marineter­rein Ams­ter­dam. The goal is to exper­i­ment with fly­ing drones in and out of the pilot’s field of vision. For exam­ple, in such areas as inspec­tion or urgent deliv­ery of med­i­cines. This future use of drones is also referred to as “Urban Air Mobil­i­ty”.

Accord­ing to Thi­js Mei­jer, direc­tor of Marineter­rein Ams­ter­dam, the area is ide­al for test­ing urban drones. “Embank­ments, build­ings, mead­ows and trees, har­bor, indus­tri­al zone, recre­ation­al areas and logis­tics: all this is present here.”

Among oth­er things, Ams­ter­dam Drone Lab offers its mem­bers an airstrip, work­shops and liv­ing quar­ters. Accord­ing to the ini­tia­tors, since the area is not acces­si­ble to the pub­lic, test flights can be imple­ment­ed in a safe but real­is­tic way.

Mey­er: “The unique prop­er­ties of Marineter­rein Ams­ter­dam allow real-world unmanned oper­a­tions such as con­struc­tion work, inspec­tion of facil­i­ties and med­ical trans­port. Step by step, we are work­ing togeth­er with the com­mu­ni­ty to start fly­ing VLOS and BVLOS here, thus solv­ing the prob­lems of the city. We invite all inter­est­ed par­ties to par­tic­i­pate in our future field lab for the Urban Air Mobil­i­ty field lab.”

Partners

The part­ners of the Ams­ter­dam Drone Lab are the Munic­i­pal­i­ty of Ams­ter­dam, AirHub and KPN. Since this loca­tion is in Schiphol con­trolled air­space, all test flights will be approved by the Dutch Air Traf­fic Author­i­ty.