Tallinn Airport lets driverless shuttles run close to airplanes, opening the way to wider airport automation

Autonomous cars and shuttles are no longer rare on city streets, but airports with their extraordinary safety rules are a different matter.

At Tallinn Airport, Estonian company Auve Tech is now running its MiCa shuttles on routes passing close to parked aircraft — for the first time, without a safety operator on board. It is a step the company hopes will make driverless transport pay for itself and perhaps spread to other airports.

The Tallinn shuttles serve Magnetic MRO, an aircraft maintenance firm with hangars on opposite sides of the airfield. They move workers, tools and spare parts between the sites throughout the day.

Getting here took years. Auve Tech began testing their tech at the airport in 2023, and the commercial service started in 2025, first with a required safety operator on board. Taking that person out was the hard part.

"When conducting a drive inside the airport, that's a whole other story. You have so many layers of safety rules that you have to comply with," Deivis Sepp, Fleet Operations Lead at Auve Tech, told Euronews Next. "That's why getting the permit is kind of a miracle."

Sepp said the airport's safety board has been reviewing the shuttles' performance data every week throughout the test period.

"Terabytes and terabytes of data have been gathered," Sepp told Euronews Next. "They are not giving us the permit like, 'Hey, just go ahead and do your thing, do the innovation.' It doesn't work like that."

How MiCa works

MiCa is a small electric shuttle that Auve Tech unveiled in October 2022. It is designed for last-mile transport in pre-mapped areas, and it carries up to eight passengers. MiCa is rated Level 4 for self-driving — meaning it can drive itself without a human at the wheel, but only within defined conditions, such as a mapped route.

To ”see” its surroundings, the shuttle uses ten cameras and seven laser-based sensors, which give it a 360-degree view. It does not roam freely between the planes — it follows a fixed route with rules built in and reacts immediately to any potential obstacle.

"It will see enough ahead to make a decision," Sepp told Euronews Next. "We are at a cross section, looking from one place to another, and if it's safe to move, it will go."

The shuttle also reacts to small hazards. Euronews' reporter had to grab a handrail when the shuttle braked hard midway through the ride, apparently for a bird crossing its route.

“Small birds are flying around here, and it detects everything near it," Sepp told Euronews Next. "So of course safety comes first for us."

Humans are still part of the system, but from a distance. The vehicle makes its own decisions, and a remote operator in a tele-monitoring room watches over it.

"The vehicle decides what to do, whether to do it and when to do it," Sepp told Euronews Next. "But if some glitch happens, it will ask permission from the tele-monitoring operator."

Making the sums add up

For Auve Tech, removing the on-board operator is a crucial economic step. Taavi Rõivas, Chairman of the Supervisory Board and a former Estonian prime minister, said a safety operator on board "doesn't make much sense commercially".

"Regulatory needs are there to still have a human in the loop, but one human can supervise or remotely monitor several vehicles," Rõivas told Euronews Next.

He put the break-even point at around three vehicles per remote operator.

"If you look at three vehicles at the same time, see what they're doing, and if necessary give some minor guidance, then we can match the price of human-driven vehicles," Rõivas told Euronews Next.

"Once we can roll out this service in this way, I believe the scaling of autonomous vehicle transportation will be very, very rapid."

Their main client already sees the benefit in cost and reliability. Risto Mäeots, CEO of Magnetic Group, said his company drives "almost 50,000 kilometres every year" between its hangars. Before the shuttles, they had to only use human drivers, which sometimes brought problems of their own.

"We faced a lot of reliability issues. For example, people can get sick, and there was staff turnover," Mäeots told Euronews Next. "It turned out to be a big challenge."

He described transport as a cost centre for a maintenance business, not a source of revenue. He also said the company, which competes with much larger aviation players, has to be inventive to survive.

"We half-joke that we don't have a right to exist because we are a small company against major aviation players," Mäeots told Euronews Next. "So for us to exist, we have to really think out of the box."

"We thought it was going to be predominantly used by people, but now we see an equally important part is spare parts being delivered between the hangars," Mäeots told Euronews Next. Bulky items still travel by conventional vehicles because of the size limits.

Auve Tech now wants to take the model elsewhere. Rõivas said the immediate target is the large number of last-mile shuttle services running in closed environments, such as corporate campuses, where regulators find it easier to allow vehicles without safety operators.

"Globally there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of last-mile shuttle services, only in closed environments," Rõivas told Euronews Next. "We see that we can either match the price or outperform the price of the current service."

Interest is coming from Europe, Japan, Abu Dhabi and the US, he said. Other airports’ representatives are visiting Tallinn "pretty much one airport per week" to see the service working. Some consider carrying VIP passengers or move people between gates in such shuttles.

"We are expecting to have, very soon, announcements that much bigger airports than Tallinn will have a similar service up and running," Rõivas told Euronews Next.

Sepp is confident about the direction. "I believe within the next 10 years, autonomous transportation solutions inside the airport will be a common thing to see," he told Euronews Next.