Sweden is another country with a drone industry whose influence on the global scene may far outpace its actual size.  That’s because the industry has long focused on making strategic investments in cutting-edge technology design and innovation tailored to Sweden’s domestic needs rather than on expanding mainstream drone capabilities that might be packaged and sold en masse abroad.

For example, you won’t find Swedish drones in the forefront of remote food and store package delivery, or in real estate and construction site mapping or infrastructure inspections — applications that tend to dominate the drone industry in the US and other parts of Europe. But thanks to steady and growing support from the Swedish government’s national R&D division, Swedish drones are carving out distinctive niches and sub-niches all their own.  These include the detection and deterrence of illegal logging operations (a huge problem in Sweden), protection of endangered wildlife (from aggressive developers and from illegal poachers), and remote monitoring and analysis of climate change patterns on the country’s northern coast.

In fact, conservation is just one of Sweden’s distinctive drone niches. Another area of strategic investment is long-distance search-and-rescue (SAR) – especially critical in a country with vast snow-covered landscapes where skiers and travelers often find themselves trapped – or lost.  Unlike the US, where roughly 10% of local police and fire departments are equipped with SAR drones, first responders throughout Sweden routinely deploy them, with great success,  And SAR drones in Sweden also occupy distinctive sub-niches.  One example:  Researchers from Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology have designed a multi-drone SAR system made up of a fleet of fixed-wing drones launched from a marine vessel that scouts a predefined area, along with live-feed quadcopters.  Swedish policy-makers have designed the system to monitor the large number of refugees escaping war zones and natural disasters that take to the sea but get lost and drown.  Helicopters currently perform much of this work, but cannot cover the same vast ocean territory as quickly, cheaply or sustainably as drones.

Emergency medical supply delivery is another area of Swedish technology innovation.  For example, Sweden is the first country in the world to attach automated emergency defibrillators, or AEDS, to drones, specifically to respond to cardiac arrest incidents.  Last year, the country captured global headlines when a 71-year old man who suffered cardiac arrest escaped death thanks to the speedy drone delivery of an AED to a passerby who aided the victim until first responders could arrive on the scene.  The first precious minutes in which cardiac victims receive emergency aid often determines their chances of survival.  Thanks to a growing number of successes, and the rising incidence of cardiac incidents among the world’s graying population, overseas demand for Swedish AED drones — first introduced by the start-up Everdone in 2020 – has risen sharply over the past year..

These are just a few examples of how Sweden’s investments in cutting-edge drone technology tailored to its domestic policy needs are beginning to pay huge dividends.  Other advances are occurring in “precision” drone agriculture – which allows landowners to assess soil fertility and crop stress to better target their farm inputs, eliminating waste – and in forest fire-fighting, an area that some nations, including the United States, have tended to declare “off–limits” to drones.  Sweden, it seems, is not afraid to go where the need is greatest, even if it means confronting and overcoming regulatory obstacles, typically through greater public-private collaboration.

Sweden’s annual drone industry growth rate is currently less than 3% – slow and steady but considerably lower than rates recorded by France, the UK and even Greece, another drone “comer.”  But that figure is also highly misleading. Policy-planners in Sweden took the long view and made early strategic investments in drone technology innovation that are only now coming to fruition.  Innovation has been tailored to selected niches and sub-niches to achieve maximum effect.  As word of Sweden’s success spreads, the nation’s drone industry will continue to accelerate – expanding overseas sales, creating new foreign joint ventures and partnerships (already apparent in the case of Norway and the Netherlands) and leaving a greater mark across the entire European continent..

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