Drone Fusion, new platform helps to educate professionals of the future

During ADW Hybrid - from 18 to 20 January - an international initiative will be launched to promote exchanges between drone researchers and schools: Drone Fusion. Initiator Thierry Tartarin and teacher Heino Brink explain why there is a great need for such collaboration. “Drones are here to stay. We need to train a new generation for professions of the future.”

Thierry Tartarin is Researcher at the Business Models research group, PhD candidate at TU Delft and Lecturer Minor Digital Business Models & Blockchain at the School of Finance and Accounting at Saxion University of Applied Sciences. He took the initiative for a global platform on which research and educational institutions will collaborate with business and industry in the field of drones: Drone Fusion.

Launch Drone Fusion

The initiative will officially launch in January at ADW Hybrid. Together with Heino Brink, teacher at Graafschap College Doetinchem, he explains why Drone Fusion should be introduced. “Drone Fusion is an international platform for drone researchers and schools innovating for a circular tomorrow”, Tartarin explains. “Drones are up and coming and will affect all industries, they will create an expected 100.000 jobs in the EU alone in the coming years. So schools need to be offering education for these jobs of tomorrow.”

International focus

Tartarin wants to roll out Drone Fusion internationally right away. “I already have many interested parties contacts in the USA, Germany, Romania, Indonesia, Malaysia and India who would like to join Drone Fusion,” he says. “Markets for drones are developing at different paces internationally depending on the legal set up, societal acceptance and technological advancements of a country. It should be ludicrous to look at it only from a Dutch perspective. In any case, every educational institution has an international department. That's how we work in education. So it is easy to take advantage of the available partner networks each school has built over the years to create momentum.”

Tartarin: “If you see the ambitions of the European Union in the field of drones and at the same time know that curriculum changes are traditionally slow to introduce, you understand that we have no time to lose. We as education need to be ready when this development really takes off. Not just in the Netherlands, but worldwide.”

Different disciplines

The idea arose as follows. Because of his PhD research, Tartarin sought researchers in the field of drones and communities of teachers or scientists involved in different disciplines. But he realised that drone researchers are often working in isolation, mainly due to the different phases of development in which the drone industry finds itself. “People who deal with the technical aspects of drones have little or no contact with people who deal with the legal aspects or laws and regulations. While those different disciplines do influence each other.”

But there was another reason to create a platform like Drone Fusion: “If we agree that drones are not going away, we have to think of who will not only fly them but also who will treat the data they generate. So drone operators and data processors will be amongst these key new jobs in the future. The fact that drones have a relative low entry investment in the market should contribute to new entrepreneurs grabbing this new opportunity and creating new companies and jobs. Furthermore drones seem also to attract an increasing number of women in the industry and that can only be good - Women in tech movement.”

Create cohesion

Heino Brink can only confirm this. “We have been experimenting with drones for some time now,” says Brink. “We teach in the field of legislation and regulations and flying skills. And we conduct research into the sustainability of drones, in collaboration with our automotive departments. We are now in the phase of adapting our curriculum to train our students for the work that will be needed in the future.”

The Drone Fusion platform: 24/7 exchange of ideas

The idea is that all Drone Fusion participants contribute their own experiences and that the platform develops as organically as possible. The aim is to develop a website where participants from all over the world can share their research or research questions with each other. “A kind of supply and demand site with 24/7 exchange of ideas,” says Tartarin. If you would like to join the Drone Fusion movement, get in touch and we shall make it happen together!”