Nokia Drone Networks solution includes 300 Drone-in-a-Box bundles and is designed for public safety and industrial use cases in Switzerland
Swisscom Broadcast has selected Nokia to deploy a nationwide Drones-as-a-Service network across Switzerland. It plans to have 300 Nokia Drone-in-a-Box units ready to deploy for emergency response, perimeter protection and infrastructure inspection. The aim is to improve the safety of public sector workers and promote Industry 4.0 practices.
This will be the second nationwide deployment for Nokia Drone Networks after Belgium’s Citymesh. The vendor claims this highlights how it can modernise digital infrastructure using mission-critical industrial edge computing (MXIE) plus 3GPP technologies for operations requiring beyond line of sight, autonomous operation.
Public safety
As well as proecting first responders’ lives, the remotely operated drones can also help save the lives of those involved in incidents by gathering relevant information within the first minutes of an emergency, boosting first responders’ situational awareness.
Public safety agencies in Switzerland simply request a drone flight from Swisscom Broadcast. The drones are ‘packaged’ with a service portfolio including expertise, compliance, data collection and analysis of the collected data from Nokia and Swisscom Broadcast.
The deployment is expected to be available in all areas of Switzerland. Nokia and Swisscom will continue cooperating with competent regulatory bodies to ensure all operations comply with regulatory frameworks, especially from spectrum and aviation safety standpoints.
Protecting industrial workers
Drones will also boost worker safety within the Swiss industry through applications as inspecting tall or hard-to-reach infrastructure, which removes the need for workers to climb or walk around hazardous areas. As Nokia Drone Networks are an integral part of the Nokia MXIE platform architecture, they enable easy onboarding of additional applications for industrial customers with Edge computing needs, such as creating 3D maps or detecting assets.
The deployment will facilitate reliable Drone-as-a-Service operations at scale in Switzerland with Nokia Drone Networks, a turnkey Drone-in-a-Box solution that integrates the drone, a docking station, a ground control station, a payload with video and thermal cameras, related software, and service components.
The solution uses APIs for integration with, for example, as traffic monitoring systems, video management software, dispatch solutions and industrial inspection and process monitoring systems.
This collaboration with Swisscom Broadcast will also enable industrial use cases, automation and beyond line of sight operations, plus the expansion of 3GPP technologies for drone use in Switzerland.
Dominik Müller, CEO at Swisscom Broadcast, said: “The integration of our existing People Density Tool and our Drone Operations expertise with Nokia’s industrial grade hardware in combination with an open and future proof Software architecture is an important key to support such large-scale projects.”