Issue 37 Unmanned Systems Technology April/May 2021 Einride next-gen Pod l Battery technology l Dive Technologies AUV-Kit l UGVs insight l Vanguard EFI/ETC vee twins l Icarus Swarms l Transponders l Sonobot 5 l IDEX 2021 report

51 sector groups to provide services for local residents. Among the numerous r&d projects it participates in is the Sohjoa Last Mile project, which is aimed at trialling autonomous electric shuttles in various cities around the Baltic. As well as transporting people without needing an operator or safety driver inside the shuttles, the trials are intended to establish what is needed technologically, legally, infrastructurally or otherwise to establish networks and standards for automated public transport systems. The original Sohjoa project started trialling automated shuttles in mixed traffic in 2016. Sohjoa Last Mile is the third round of the project, and is the successor to the Sohjoa Baltic project that ran from 2017 to late 2020 in several northern European cities. This included large-scale pilots in Helsinki, Kongsberg and Tallinn, with smaller pilots in Gdansk, Jelgava and Aizkraukle. Operations lasted 19 months, during which more than 19,400 passengers were carried over a total of 11,634 km. Twelve partners participated in that research, led by Helsinki’s Metropolia University of Applied Sciences. “Smart mobility has been one of our key focus areas in our research since 2015, and to date we’ve done trials with Navya’s Arma autonomous shuttle [as featured in UST 7, April/May 2016] and EasyMile’s EZ10 [ UST 31, April/May 2020],” says Jari Honkonen, project manager at Forum Virium. Azat Ismailogullari, project manager at Metropolia University, adds, “Sohjoa Last Mile will have three main pilot sites, with some mixture of remote control and automation. For example, one site is in Tallin, where the Iseauto shuttle from Auve Tech – a spin-out from the Tallin University of Technology – will be used. “The two other sites are at Kongsberg in Norway and Gdansk in Poland. At the moment, the teams at those sites are at the procurement stage to see which companies will put their solutions forward.” Forum Virium is also running a similar project, called Fabulos, in which European consortia are trialling vehicles such as the Iseauto and the Gacha shuttle from Muji in commercial fleets and mixed traffic in cities including Helsinki and Lamia (in Greece). The Iseauto is an eight-seat shuttle with a kerb weight of 1250 kg. It is powered by a 16 kWh, 330 V battery pack and runs on a 25 kW permanent magnet motor near the vehicle’s rear. The system control software runs on the Ubuntu 16.04 operating system and uses ROS Kinetic as its middleware; Autoware 1.9.0 has been the company’s primary development tool. The Gacha has been developed through a collaboration between Finnish UGVs | Insight Unmanned Systems Technology | April/May 2021 A Navya Arma undergoes trials as part of a smart mobility project in Helsinki… (Courtesy of Forum Virium, photo by Jari Honkonen) ...while An EasyMile EZ10 navigates autonomously through Jelgava, Latvia (Courtesy of Zemgale Planning Region, photo by Ilze Lujane)