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Flytrex Expands Drone Delivery in Iceland Israel’s Flytrex is expanding its drone delivery service in Reykjavik, Iceland, with local e-commerce company Aha. With the launch of 13 new routes, the service will cover almost half of Reykjavik, delivering sushi and other food directly to customers’ backyards. Flytrex began operations in Reykjavik with a single route that crossed a bay separating two parts of the city. After crossing, the drone landed and a trained operator collected the package and completed the delivery by road. Approval of the 13 new routes follows a “meticulous regulatory process” with ICETRA, the Icelandic civil aviation authority, that included hundreds of flights to preassigned drop-off points, says Flytrex.

Rather than landing, Flytrex’s latest drone hovers and lowers its package to the ground by winch. Credit: Flytrex

The autonomous drones can deliver to a public location and are approved to fly up to 700 m (2,300 ft.) off their route to make backyard deliveries in select, approved neighborhoods—beginning with a limited number of addresses and expanding with approval from property owners. On arrival at the drop-off point, the drone hovers and the customer uses an app to order it to winch the package to the ground. When the package touches down, the wire detaches from the vehicle, which returns to the drone port. “We will see tremendous benefits when drone deliveries become mainstream. They provide faster delivery, are exponentially better for the environment, and each drone can replace at least 3-4 cars, reducing traffic and transport infrastructure requirements,” says Aha CEO Maron Kristofersson. “While the service is still undergoing continual improvement, drone delivery will soon be the new normal,” Kristofersson says. Flytrex says its goal is to extend home deliveries to every resident in Reykjavik in the coming months. Flytrex is bringing its drone delivery service to the U.S. under the Transportation Department’s Unmanned Aircraft System Integration Pilot Program (UAS IPP). The company is partnered with North Carolina’s Department of Transportation to test localized food delivery by establishing drone delivery stations in suburban communities. Small businesses will be able to use this platform for commercial deliveries. Zipline To Demo Medical Drone Delivery to Pentagon Silicon Valley startup Zipline International, which is delivering blood by drone in Rwanda, is working with the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to demonstrate the potential for medical drone delivery in humanitarian crises and disaster zones. Zipline has received a $2.5 million contract from the DIU to evaluate its unmanned-aircraft instant delivery system. The company’s drone is catapult-launched, whereupon it follows a preprogrammed route autonomously, air-dropping its payload by disposable parachute, then returning to base for recovery. Zipline launched operations in Rwanda in October 2016, and is delivering blood products to 21 remote transfusion centers from its distribution center. The company introduced a faster system in April, with a redesigned drone, and upgrades to launch, autonomous flight and recovery operations.

Zipline drones deliver blood for transfusions within 30 min. of receiving a text order from a clinic. Credit: Zipline International

The service already delivers more than 20% of Rwanda’s blood supply outside of the capital Kigali, and Zipline is opening a second distribution center to expand coverage to the entire country. Plans to set up a medical delivery system in Tanzania were announced in August 2017, but Zipline says another country will likely come online first as the world’s largest drone delivery service. Several governments have signed agreements, most recently Lagos state in Nigeria. Zipline is to conduct medical delivery flights in the U.S. with the North Carolina Department of Transportation under the FAA’s UAS IPP. Drone-delivery company Wing, meanwhile, has ferried frozen desserts to two homes in Virginia as part of a technology demonstration under an IPP project led by the Virginia Tech Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership UAS test site. Wing recently graduated from the Alphabet X “Moonshot factory” to become an independent company under Google parent Alphabet. The company is conducting trials of its drone delivery service in suburban Canberra, Australia. DARPA Tests Autonomous Fast Scout Drones DARPA has demonstrated algorithms that could enable small commercial drones to become autonomous scouts in urban battle zones or searchers for survivors inside buildings damaged by natural disasters. In flight tests conducted under Phase 2 of the agency’s Fast Lightweight Autonomy (FLA) program, quadcopters flew between buildings and through alleyways in a mock town, and entered a building through a window, mapped the interior and navigated autonomously down a stairwell and out of an open door. Building on Phase 1 flights in 2017, the tests at the Guardian Centers urban training facility in Perry, Georgia, showed significant progress in outdoor as well as indoor autonomous flight scenarios, says DARPA. FLA contracts were awarded in 2015 to teams from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Draper Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), and Scientific Systems with AeroVironment. The program is focused on developing advanced autonomy algorithms for quadcopters weighing less than 5 lb., meaning limited battery and computing power.

“We go into an unknown environment that is cluttered with all kinds of obstacles, and we don’t have the benefit of GPS or an RF [radio-frequency] link. How can we fly in that environment? That is essentially the challenge that FLA undertook,” says Jean-Charles Lede, DARPA program manager. “Unmanned systems equipped with FLA algorithms need no remote pilot, no GPS guidance, no communications link, and no preprogrammed map of the area—the onboard software, lightweight processor and low-cost sensors do all the work autonomously in real time,” he says. For Phase 2, the MIT/Draper team simplified the sensor payload to a single camera to lighten their air vehicle for higher speed. The team was tasked with building a geographic and semantic map of the city, autonomously exploring the unknown environment to create the map, and recognizing roads, buildings and parked cars and identifying them on the map. “We were looking at building a map of that environment. Not necessarily a dimensional map, but more like a semantic map where we have the streets and then we say we have three cars in that street,” Lede says. Images of the cars could be downloaded in real time via Wi-Fi link to the Android Tactical Assault Kit handheld app used by deployed forces. UPenn researchers halved the size and weight of their vehicle so it could fly autonomously in confined spaces, through small apertures and in a 3D environment. This required development of a single-board computer housing all the sensors and the low-power processor. Their drone flew into a building through a narrow second-floor window to autonomously create a 3D map of the unknown interior, visiting open rooms, finding a staircase and descending to exit the building via an open door. Algorithms developed under the FLA program are scheduled to transition to the U.S. Army Research Laboratory for further development and application to military programs, says DARPA. Other, nonmilitary applications include entering a damaged structure after an earthquake to look for survivors or check whether it is structurally safe.