Category: drones

UK to plan world’s biggest automated drone superhighway connecting cities and towns for mail package delivery

The UK is setting up the world’s biggest automated drone superhighway within two years, which will be used on a 164-mile Skyway project that will connect towns and cities.

The project, according to BBC, is part of a £273 million funding package for the aerospace sector.

Drone mail delivery to the Isles of Scilly and across Scotland is also part of other projects being planned, which will include delivering medicines to patients in remote regions.

The chief operating officer of the aviation technology company Altitude Angel, Chris Forster, said that the drone superhighway will not only be used for business logistics but will also help “police and medical deliveries of vaccines and blood samples”.

Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng will officially make the announcement of the project at the Farnborough International Airshow. He believes the funding will “help the sector seize on the enormous opportunities for growth that exist as the world transitions to cleaner forms of flight”.

Drone pilots may become superfluous in the future.

New research from Aarhus University has allowed artificial intelligence to take over control of drones scanning and measuring terrain.

A research project at Aarhus University (AU) in collaboration with the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) aims to make measuring and documenting gravel and limestone quarries much faster, cheaper and easier in the future.

The project has allowed artificial intelligence to take over the human-controlled drones currently being used for the task.

“We’ve made the entire process completely automatic.

We tell the drone where to start, and the width of the wall or rock face we want to photograph, and then it flies zig-zag all the way along and lands automatically,” says Associate Professor Erdal Kayacan, an expert in artificial intelligence and drones at the Department of Engineering at Aarhus University.

By Brian Heater

Any given year, the real unsung highlight of re:Mars are the dozen or so startups and researchers who show off their wares on the show floor. There are always a couple of cool projects that have somehow managed to escape our radar, thus far. Los Angeles-based Airrow jumped out with a clever product offering.

The startup makes a device designed to automatically remove and replace batteries and payloads for drones. It operates similarly to a CNC machine or 3D printer, with a gantry that moves along X- and Y-axes to get the battery from the charger to the drone and back again.

The process is currently a manual one, requiring a human to swap and replace. It’s only slightly inconvenient one to one but can become a major hassle when scaling up, like, say, in the case of drone-based food delivery programs.

BAE Systems and Malloy Aeronautics have announced plans to explore the development of an all-electric ‘heavy lift’ uncrewed air system (UAS) as a potential new solution to deliver cost-effective, sustainable rapid response capability to military, security and civilian customers.

The all-electric powered concept vehicle will be designed with a top speed of 140 kilometres per hour and the ability to carry a class-leading 300kg payload with a range of 30 kilometres.

The cutting-edge technology could be used for a range of applications such as performing ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore movements to support military and security operations and logistics. Emitting zero carbon, the uncrewed system could help revolutionise military operations where there is a requirement to carry heavy loads, helping to keep military personnel out of harm’s way in dangerous situations or disaster zones, whilst reducing the environmental impact of our armed forces. 

The companies are exploring opportunities to collaborate on capability, design, manufacture and marketing of the concept vehicle.

Snap takes another stab at hardware with a selfie drone called Pixy

By Alex Heath

MoreMore than five years after it released Spectacles, Snap is back with a second hardware product. And this time it flies.

Yes, Snap made a drone. Called Pixy, the small yellow puck takes off from your hand, follows you around, and captures video that can be sent back to Snapchat. It’s Snap’s attempt at making a drone that’s friendlier and more approachable than other products on the market — and it may hint at the more advanced, AR-powered future Snap is building toward.

Pixy is available online for $230 in the US and France starting Thursday. Unlike most existing drones, it’s small and light enough to fit in a pant pocket. There isn’t a controller; it takes off from and lands on an outstretched palm, and it uses six pre-programmed flight patterns that are accessible through a dial on the top of the device.

Why on earth would Snap, which primarily operates an ephemeral messaging app, make a selfie drone? It’s the first question I pose to CEO Evan Spiegel.

“Because we’re a camera company,” he tells me recently over video chat. Snap has brandished that tagline since 2016 when the company changed its name from Snapchat to Snap and released its first pair of Spectacles. “Our mission is to empower people to express themselves, live in the moment, learn about the world, and have fun together. And this product does exactly that.”

The Dutch High Tech Campus Eindhoven (HTCE) in the Netherlands started the first demonstrations of autonomous drone services in March 2022. HTCE is one of the consortium partners of the EU-funded FF2020 project that is developing a state-of-the-art geospatial UAM ecosystem by incorporating UAM within the geospatial data infrastructure of cities. Besides Eindhoven, FF2020’s solutions will also be tested in another four living labs during the project: Milan (Italy), Oulu (Finland), Tartu (Estonia) and Zaragoza (Spain).

The drone operations will continue until the end of September 2022. The five use cases tested on campus focus on security support, building inspection, meal delivery, express shipping and emergency automated external defibrillator (AED) delivery.

The first use case involves the use of drones for campus surveillance to assist security personnel. In the second use case, drones will be scanning and inspecting buildings to assess their condition. The remaining three use cases concern the last-mile delivery of goods such as meals, packages and AEDs to the rural part of campus.

Image shows drones at sunset. Researchers in Spain have conducted a mass drone flight test to trial a new traffic management system for UAVs 

By Aisling Ní Chúláin 

Some bad news is in store for those irritated by the unmistakable buzzing of electric drones: they’re not going away anytime soon. In fact, they are set to become only more ubiquitous.

If estimates from SESAR – a European partnership tasked with overhauling European airspace and air traffic management – are to be believed, by 2050 there could be close to 7.5 million personal and commercial drones zipping through European skies.

To prepare for this new reality, researchers in Spain are testing out a new system that will, hopefully, keep these drones from crashing into each other.

It uses a cargo pod as an airfoil.

By  Chris Young

The CCY-01Cyclotech

Is that a UFO?

Austria-based vertical propulsion company Cyclotech partnered with Japanese delivery firm Yamato to develop a concept for an unusual delivery drone using Cyclotech’s thrust vectoring propulsion system.

The concept aircraft, called CCY-01, flies using six of Cyclotech’s unique CycloRotors and the company says it will be capable of precision landing in confined space at the same time as handling challenging wind conditions.

Cyclotech’s cylindrical rotors spin around at high speeds while several blades alter their angle to direct thrust. The company has performed its first free flight test using its system, which allows aircraft to rapidly redirect thrust. During that flight test, it used four Cyclorotors arranged in a manner that made its aircraft look almost like a flying car with wheels instead of a traditional drone.

FedEx will begin testing autonomous cargo drone delivery with Elroy Air.

By Dashveenjit Kaur

The shipping giant wants to put the Chaparral aircraft through real-life testing by next year, within its middle-mile operations—a range of 300-500 miles. 6 April 2022 

• The Chaparral aircraft is an eVTOL drone delivery cargo system that can autonomously pick up 300-500 pounds of cargo and air-deliver by up to 300 miles
• The test would involve moving shipments between sortation locations
• Both companies have worked together since 2020 with FedEx providing Elroy Air insight into its needs and preference

Just two months after Elroy Air, the company that developed the first end-to-end autonomous vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aerial cargo system, unveiled its pre-production aircraft — the Chaparral, shipping giant FedEx Corp plans to put it through real-life testing by 2023. The autonomous cargo drone which is made to carry between 35-to-225kg of goods for delivery over a distance of up to 480km, would be tested between the perimeters of FedEx’s sortation locations.

By Ishveena Singh

A UK consortium has revealed its blueprint to build the world’s largest and longest “drone superhighway,” connecting towns and cities across the nation. The 165-mile (265 km) Project Skyway is being hailed as “the most ambitious transport project proposed for the UK since the advent of the railway network in the 18th century.”

Led by Unified Traffic Management (UTM) software provider Altitude Angel, the consortium says it would initially connect the Midlands with the Southeast to cover cities such as Reading, Oxford, Milton Keynes, Cambridge, Coventry, and Rugby. In the second phase of the project, the superhighway could be extended to Southampton on the south coast and Ipswich on the east coast.

The idea is to enable businesses in these regions to develop and grow through the commercialization of new drone-based products, processes, and services. However, a decision on whether the project would receive the green light is not expected for a few weeks at least.

But that’s not stopping Richard Parker, CEO and founder at Altitude Angel, from calling the proposed drone superhighway a harbinger of the second transport revolution in Britain. Here’s Parker: