Sweden: Aerit First Offers Drone Delivery Services to Homes

Aer­it First, a Swe­den-basec drone deliv­ery com­pa­ny, announced last week a BVLOS deliv­ery tri­al for gro­ceries and gen­er­al prod­ucts to select­ed Swedish homes, reports a press release. The tri­al cov­ered house­holds across a 38 square mile area sur­round­ing ICA Nära Gräd­dö Skärgård­shan­del in Nor­rtäl­je, Swe­den.

The project, fund­ed by Sweden’s inno­va­tion agency, Vin­no­va, is a joint effort between Aer­it, ICAx, Research Insti­tutes of Swe­den and Nor­rtäl­je Kom­mun, to eval­u­ate the ben­e­fits of drone deliv­ery as well as study pub­lic recep­tion of the ser­vices.

The deliv­er­ies took place over six days in extreme weath­er con­di­tions includ­ing snow and tem­per­a­tures below neg­a­tive 10 degrees Cel­sius. Among the 30 house­holds who reg­is­tered for the project, 10 were select­ed for par­tic­i­pa­tion. Once signed-up, cus­tomers could request deliv­ery through the ICA Pron­to mobile appli­ca­tion.

Alex Per­rien

Alex Per­rien, CEO of Aer­it, com­ment­ed, “We reli­ably pro­vid­ed access to goods and ser­vices in harsh weath­er con­di­tions to loca­tions that nor­mal­ly require sev­er­al modes of trans­porta­tion to reach. We have replaced short car and boat trips to the store with Nim­bi flights, reduc­ing trav­el time while improv­ing safe­ty and sus­tain­abil­i­ty.”

He con­tin­ued, “In addi­tion to the sup­port of Vin­no­va and our many project part­ners, none of this would have been pos­si­ble with­out the inno­v­a­tive lead­er­ship at Trans­port­styrelsen who is work­ing hard to main­tain com­pet­i­tive­ness of the Swedish air­space.”

Aer­it is a drone deliv­ery ser­vice based in Stock­holm, Swe­den. Aerit’s autonomous Nim­bi deliv­ery drones, designed and built by the com­pa­ny, are bat­tery-pow­ered with a max pay­load capac­i­ty of 10lbs. Nim­bi fea­tures a pro­pri­etary winch­ing sys­tem that allows for both pack­age pick-up and drop-off with­out the need for sup­port­ing infra­struc­ture.

Found­ed in Jan­u­ary of 2021, Aerit’s mile­stones include reg­u­la­to­ry approval for oper­a­tions under the EASA SORA frame­work and suc­cess­ful com­ple­tion of Sweden’s first com­mer­cial drone deliv­ery of food in Octo­ber of 2021. Aer­it plans to launch con­tin­u­ous deliv­ery ser­vices in select areas around Swe­den in 2023.

For more infor­ma­tion

https://aerit.io/