We have previously pointed the revolution that drones are bringing to industries such as agriculture, construction, mining, oil, gas, media, etc… There is another application we must not forget about, a sector causing a great excitement is messaging services industry. There are forecasts that in the near future will be as normal to see drone delivery as it is nowadays to see delivery trucks from companies like DHL, Amazon, etc…
The future of delivery industry will happen once drones are able to fly beyond the line of sight of a human operator, or as technically known in BLOS conditions. Having a reasonable technical and economic feasibility, drones can be used as an optimal choice to deliver essential goods such as medicines in remote or sparsely populated areas, in addition it can be extremely useful in emergency cases such as natural disasters, etc…
Flights have already been made with these delivery drones resulting in costs of 15 to 50 euro cents for delivering 2 kilos packages within a range of 10 kilometers. So this, compared with standard ground shipping costs reduce messaging cost to a fifth.
In order to make packet delivery with drones a feasible and popular delivery system it becomes necessary to have a reliable system to avoid populated areas, power lines, no-fly zones, etc… To optimize this process the existence of predetermined landing nodes and/or refueling platforms of automatic load permits automatic deliveries at extremely distant destinations.
Veronte Autopilot Aligned with Needs on Delivery Services
The progress in the legislation controlling the use of these kind of devices as well as the systems that ensure the safety in the operation are key factors on the development of commercial applications such as building inspection, police work and obviously messaging services. In this regard Veronte has been fully developed according to DO254 and DO178 aviation regulations, providing the reliability required for this type of equipment.
The most common drone systems for delivery services usually carry the goods externally and need to land; but some models include a mini internal warehouse. By not carrying the load externally it is not required to land. These drones open their warehouse and throw the load with the help of a parachute or lower the load with a cable in the delivery field. The Veronte Autopilot includes modules for the development of these different kind of missions as well as adaptive control, algorithms which permit to adjust the flight control to the variable payload, thus optimizing their flight.
With the integration of Veronte Autopilot in drones for package delivery it is possible to include advanced features on these drones, performing fully autonomous flights. Veronte Autopilot permits to configure routes with its intuitive interface, to reach the point of delivery, simply, select a point on the map and the system draws an optimized route. It also permits to design predefined delivery routes to reach areas of distribution. To ensure safety during the flight, Veronte Autopilot uses “Sense & Avoid”, with transponders and predefined obstacles to achieve the objective of the messaging.
Definitively, soon we will not have to open the door to receive a package, probably we will be waiting at our roof to receive a messaging drone, even in skyscrapers.
