Ambulance drones in The Netherlands

Abstract

In the previous decade, a new type of air travel has seen a surge of interest from established and start-up companies alike: Air Mobility, a type of short range air travel as an alternative to taking the train or the car. Part of air mobility are a new type of aircraft, called Electric Vertical Take-off and Landing vehicles (eVTOLs), which hold potential for many new use cases.

Design agency Modyn wants to profile themselves within the field of air mobility through a vision concept for an ambulance drone. This use case, they reckoned, would be a good starting point for Air Mobility and eVTOLs, as it attracts more public acceptance than commercial use cases, such as an air-taxi service.

Modyn’s vision project was turned into this graduation thesis: an ambulance drone concept for the scope of 2035. Far enough in the future to capture the imagination, but near enough for it to relate to our present day reality in 2021.

Keeping the project grounded was one of the main challenges. It required a good understanding of the current ambulance system in The Netherlands. Which was the first research subject. A visit to ambulance station Delft and interviews with people from the field were all valuable input.

After establishing the current status quo, a look into the future was taken. Here, plans towards Air Mobility were investigated, in order to see how much The Netherlands is interested in this idea. The influence of technological and societal developments that relate to Air Mobility were plotted on a timeline, creating a roadmap towards 2035. This roadmap would create an input for the technical architecture of the ambulance drone.


Having a good picture of the present and a potential future, the research was distilled into a vision and a mission. The focus now clearly went towards using ambulance drones to replace the current ambulance helicopters. Also, the design challenges were identified and a program of requirements was compiled.

The design phase started off with the ideation, in which Virtual Reality was used to generate interior layouts. The interior is the most fundamental part of the design, as it is responsible for 90% of the interactions that the users have with the ambulance drone. An inside-out design approach was therefore the most sensible.

From the VR based ideation, the most promising interior layouts were translated into concepts. The direction was still rather open at this point, so in order to converge towards the final concept, a lot of experts were consulted for feedback on the concepts and the direction of the project.

This led to the creation of the final design, which was loosely based on two of the concepts. Thanks to the feedback from experts, the final design underwent quite a metamorphosis compared to the concepts.

The result is an ambulance drone concept with novel features and interesting ideas regarding the interior layout. The final concept has a recognisable, yet unique identity from a visual standpoint, being professional and approachable at the same time.