Airbus Skyways
Thanks to projects such as Airbus Skyways, the future of parcel delivery is coming.
Airbus is one of the pioneers in drone integration within the parcel delivery industry. The Skyways project pretends to demonstrate the feasibility of the use of drones for last-mile parcel delivery. Within the Skyways project, Airbus has developed one of the first drones for urban parcel delivery. First trials have been performed in the city of Singapore. Delivering parcels from the university to ships anchored in the area surrounding the harbor in the city of Singapore.
Skyways Project
In order to enable drone flights over the city and populated areas, the Skyways project proposes the use of virtual tubes or Sky Ways in the air. These drone highways establish a safe flight area in which drone flights are allowed without interfering with the ground or air traffic. It also makes the first step into the UTM (Unmanned Traffic Management). And the integration of drones within the controlled airspace.
One of the most critical points in parcel delivery applications with drones is safety and reliability. For this reason, at Embention we work to “Enable drones to populate our skies”, developing fail-operational systems for critical drone applications. Deep Embention experience in drone safety and certification applied to the 4x Veronte Autopilot makes it the perfect choice for the Skyways Project for performing parcel delivery over urban areas.
Drone flights over urban areas cannot afford a failure as it might be catastrophic and could cause major material and personal damages. For this reason, system architecture in the Airbus drones for Skyways has been defined for ensuring a high grade of reliability. The fail-operational design makes the drone system robust to failures. It establishes automatic fail detection and fail-safe operations so the drone can autonomously fly to a safe landing spot in case of a failure in any of its components.
4x Veronte Autopilot in Airbus drones
4x Veronte Autopilot embeds three complete autopilot cores and enables the connectivity for an external autopilot core, all them managed by an arbiter board switching control from one module to another in case of a system failure. This control system for drones is the perfect solution for parcel delivery with drones, not only because of the advanced redundancy management but also for being the unique drone autopilot system in compliance with DO178 & DO254 standards for onboard software and hardware.
Airbus drones powered by Veronte Autopilot are defining the future of urban parcel delivery within the Skyways project and at Embention we are delighted for being part of this revolution in the logistics industry.
