Autonomous Tech: How the supply chain is going hands-free

The buzz about drones

On the aerial drone side of the autonomous vehicle coin, companies such Matternet, Flirtey and Amazon have captured the industry’s imagination with pilot tests and array of different unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), from simple quad copters to larger, tilt-wing aircraft that function like conventional planes. After years of effort, however, these systems are no closer than the trucking industry to operating a commercial viable drone system.

Much of this inertia comes from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which recently published “Part 107,” the first official set of rules governing small commercial drones. In summary, commercial drones must:

• weigh less than 25 kilograms
• remain in the pilot’s line-of-sight or in the sight of a separate visual observer
• fly below an altitude of 400 feet
• fly no faster than 100 miles per hour
• only be operated during daytime
• not be operated from a moving aircraft/vehicle unless it is over a sparsely populated area

Operators of drones must be older than 16 and have an FAA-approved remote pilot certificate with a rating for UAVs, or be under the supervision of somebody who does.

Because of these restrictions, UAVs have mainly been used for surveillance and in humanitarian aid delivery in remote places following natural disasters.

UAVs took another tiny step closer to acceptance in the U.S. this year after Flirtey, an independent drone manufacturer, successfully completed what Matt Sweeny, CEO of Flirtey, called the “first fully autonomous, FAA-approved urban drone delivery in the United States,” which delivered a package containing bottled water, emergency food and a first aid kit via a six-rotor drone vehicle to a town in Nevada.

At DHL Group, the latest drone development is the “Parcelcopter 3.0,” the third generation of the integrator’s original quad-copter concept, Niezgoda said, featuring experimental tilt-wing technology. This larger UAV looks more like a miniature V-22 Osprey, with two tilt-rotors to allow for vertical take-off and landing and for straight-ahead, fixed-wing flight at up to 70 kilometers per hour. It also comes with a Skyport launch facility that automatically carries new shipments to the roof, loads them on the UAV for launch, and retrieves packages dropped off by incoming drones and stores them in lockers for customers to retrieve at any convenient time they choose.

Earlier this year, DHL completed a three-month trial to test the Parcelcopter system in real-world conditions. From January to March, the drone was used to deliver 130 small packages weighing up to two kilograms, containing medicines and other time-sensitive goods to remote areas around the mountainous region of Bavaria.

While the trend has been to build ever larger drones, “There’s always going to be an element of risk with drones, and the higher the payload, the higher the risk,” Niezgoda said. “What we really need to see is how to make these drones more flexible and more secure. We need an increase in sensing technology, so we can give the drones better eyes, letting them understand their environment.”