[ad_1]
A pizza delivered by drone feels like a good idea. A vaccine administered by a drone, in particular a vaccine that has been gently deposited in a place where it is difficult to get to, is a great vaccine. And even if it's still a while before these things appear to your specific For the last few months, technologies that seemed to be a science-fiction fantasy are more like an instruction manual.
Let's take last week: On Tuesday, Google's spin-off wing got the Federal Aviation Administration's first ever Federal Aviation Administration certification for drone deliveries. It will begin in Blacksburg, Virginia, and will deliver commercial packages weighing up to three pounds with its 11-pound vertical lift aircraft. On Wednesday, Zipline, a California-based company, launched the world's largest vaccine drone distribution network, a service in Ghana capable of delivering 600 daily medical-demand drone flights to 2,000 healthcare facilities around the world. across the country.
And less than a month ago, UPS and technology company Matternet UAVs have launched a medical sample distribution system for hospitals in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Together, these ads – a combination of regulatory, logistics and technology success – suggest that a future delivery of personal air deliveries may actually not be too far away. "Very interesting announcements have recently been made," said Ben Marcus, co-founder of an air mobility conference entitled Bentonville UP. His company, AirMap, develops drone integration systems in the public airspace. But he warns that technology developers, drone companies, and especially governments and regulators still have work to do. "The regulatory calendar naturally continues to monitor the availability of technology," he said.
It is quite natural that regulators want to move more slowly than technologists: the air can be cluttered and a drone-plane collision would leave few winners. The ground is also crowded – nobody wants drones to fall from the sky. The FAA's operational derogation for Wing is therefore a big problem. Its authorization gives the company the ability to launch deliveries, even out of the sight of professional operators, as required by current regulations. But they do not have a free reign over the sky: the government will always demand that society monitor the airspace, whether with a ground radar or with human observers on duty.
Finally, the FAA would like this monitoring to be automated. He is currently developing a drone traffic management system, which, according to Marcus, should reduce the measures that individual companies like Wing must deploy and, ultimately, enable the entire sector to develop faster. But the government will need drone operators to share data with each other and with the administration and finalize the development of new technologies to make the system work.
More specific challenges are tackled piecemeal by individual initiatives. The Swiss technology company Auterion will announce next week its partnership with GE Aviation and the Defense Innovation Unit of the US Department of Defense for the launch of its open source autonomous UAV control program. This platform can be used by consumer, commercial and government UAV manufacturers and can help to increase transparency outside the sector, which could help build public and regulator confidence. And most importantly, the system should help small drone players to reduce the dominance of Chinese UAV manufacturers, including DJI, in the market, by minimizing an obstacle to complex development: the operating system. At present, the US government is prohibited from using drone technology provided by Chinese manufacturers for safety reasons.
Even with sophisticated flight management and tracking systems, drones can sometimes break or come up against unexpected obstacles. Companies are working on solutions here too. Tyrolienne uses ballistic parachutes to prevent her fixed-wing electric drones splash. The Google wing uses machine learning based algorithms to locate secure delivery points away from trees, buildings, and power lines. The Swiss company Verity Studios has developed an algorithm that allows autonomous drones to maintain control in the event of a failure of one or two rotors. When this happens, the drones begin to run uncontrollably. The Verity system, called Failsafe, takes advantage of this rotation to work on the stabilization of the machine and the resumption of control. According to the founder of the company, Raffaello D'Andrea, this can be done almost instantly. "When Failsafe is triggered, the drone recovers in a space of 2 meters or less and remains fully controllable in this new mode of rotation," he says. "The operator can then manually steer the drone to a suitable landing point or, in the case of a standalone flight, you can ask him to" go home. "He will then proceed to his take-off location. 39, origin and will land with the help of GPS. "
And flight enthusiasts are already looking forward to the next step: air taxis. Marcus says that everything that is done for the integration and automation of UAVs will also be critical when it will be "flying cars", which are essentially human UAVs. One day, pick up your child from there too.
More great cable stories
[ad_2]
Source link