Dr. Harry Edelman is a part-time Principal Lecturer at Turku UAS and the Founder of the SKYA deep-tech start-up. His R&D interests focus on applications for autonomous drones for advanced mobility, data-driven decision-making, and urban informatics. Since 2013 he served a 5-year tenure as the Professor of Sustainable Design and Development at Tampere University and now heads a research group working on the Academy of Finland-funded “AeroPolis” research project. He has served as an advisor to the European Institute of Innovation & Technology EIT Urban Mobility since 2020.

Key take aways of the key note:

• Aerial mobility can provide a real alternative for inter-city mobility making e.g. expensive infrastructure investments unnecessary.
• Daily lives can be impacted via aerial services and transportation to remote and hard-to-reach locations making living in multiple locations, such as in summer homes, more sustainable.
• Autonomous drones and swarms can provide continuous data with high granularity. The adoption of 24/7 drone services can provide complementary data to the satellite ecosystem on-demand, with high precision, and in an affordable fashion. This is an area that is currently emerging and will contribute to augmented and real-time digital twins.

Topic: Expending horizons – the transformative role of autonomous drones in mobility and data collection
The autonomous systems are likely to impact how we will live in future cities. They connect people and goods and provide aerial data about the built and natural environment for informed design and management of cities.