Medical drone drop: Bengaluru firm to begin India’s night trials

BENGALURU: The consortium of firms led by a Bengaluru-based drone company that has completed 100 hours of the beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) medical drone delivery experiment in Gauribidanur, some 80km from Bengaluru, will begin night trials from Monday.
The Throttle Aerospace Systems (TAS) consortium has received clearance for trials from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and will conduct experimental flying and delivery for 10 hours.
Nagendran Kandasamy, CEO, TAS, told STOI: “We’ve collected about 10,056MB of actionable data from our 100 hours of BVLOS flying to strengthen our framework. Our copters delivered 454+ packages and travelled around 2,105+ km in a few extremely harsh experiments.”
As reported by TOI first, TAS’ day experiments had begun in the third week of June where they used two variants of its drone — Med-COPTER — and TAS’ on-demand delivery software called RANDINT.
The smaller variant of MedCOPTER can carry 1kg for up to 15km, while the other variant can carry 2kg for up to 12km. Both of them were tested for range and safety through the 100 hours of flying and the data has since been presented to DGCA.
“After India’s first official BVLOS medical drone delivery experiment, we are all set to begin the country’s first BVLOS night flying for the same. The experiment is scheduled between August 16 and 20 and we’ve got a special approval for this from BEMC (BVLOS Experiment Monitoring Committee) after levels of scrutiny,” Kandasamy said.
The consortium said the outcome and learning from the night flying will pave a new path on drone-delivery readiness for healthcare emergency and e-commerce segments.
Aside from TAS, the consortium has Involi-Swiss, which specialises in air traffic awareness systems for professional drone applications, which provides unmanned traffic management (UTM) systems, and Honeywell Aerospace as a safety expert.
The consortium had partnered with Narayana Health Care which wanted to understand the kind of medicines that could be transported using drones, challenges and whether or not this could be used routinely in future.
“Our software will get the demand raised by Narayana. Nobody will know who the recipient is, but the delivery will be made to the preloaded address,” Kandasamy had said earlier.
Besides Narayana, Udaan, the B2B e-commerce startup, had also sought the consortium for some information on the commercial front. As user partners, Udaan was interested in knowing the per-kilometre cost and other such commercial aspects of object delivery.
“With the upcoming simplified drone policy, India is set to safely integrate commercial BVLOS flights sooner than we think. The night flying will take us one step closer to a commercial licence,” Kandasamy added.