End to End logistic support tools for effective aerial drone delivery against COVID-19

As the usage of drones in the parcel delivery space gathers pace, many of the technologies required to fly drones have been solved to a large extent.

Already drones are impacting the delivery of medical supplies and high value urgent items such as we are doing in the Solent FMZ project preparing to fly cancer treatments between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight.

However drones will only compete with humans and van delivery, if the systems are available to support all aspects of the end to end process, in particular when the drone is not flying.

Before and at the end of flights drones need to be handled to load cargo, remove cargo and perform maintenance.

While much emphasis has been placed on how the drone can fly safely and efficiently, very little work has focused on how parcels are loaded and delivered autonomously in such a way that the drones can function with greater functionality and autonomy.

For the past 9 months Motion robotics has concentrated its research in this area; to develop different automated cargo loading and unloading methods that will suit different real world needs such as field replenishment of medical products to pop up clinics in remote areas, autonomous collection of waste and automating warehouse parcel to drone interaction.

The key objective of the project is to build on our TRL5/6 solutions and take them to TRL9 levels such that at the end of the project we can begin deployment of our drones, in the field, and scaling up the service to meet the needs of COVID-19 rapid response as early as possible in 2021\.