Lifeboat Foundation

The thing didn’t stand a chance.

UPS is rolling along with its drone delivery program, working with partner CVS Pharmacy to deliver prescription drugs to customer doorsteps via its newly deployed commercial drones. UPS delivered medications to two paying customers on November 1 using the Matternet M2 drone system that the logistics company is using in partnership with Matternet…

Iris Automation recently flew a drone over Kansas without ground-based radar or a visual observer, the first time the FAA has authorized what is known as a “beyond-visual-line-of-sight” drone flight with only an automated onboard collision-avoidance system monitoring.

Drone makers have to convince us that airborne burritos and transplant organs are worth the noise and privacy invasion.

David Opateyibo was 17 years old when he built Nigeria’s first locally-made drone in Lagos.

Opateyibo led a team of Lagos State Polytechnic students to produce the country’s first prototype of a drone, which authorities in Lagos hope to deploy for security surveillance.

Continue reading “At age 17, he built Nigeria’s first locally-made drone and on a mission to build an aircraft” »

UPS Flight Forward recently was awarded their Part 135 certification from the Federal Aviation Administration, which allows them to make deliveries by drone throughout the U.S. This week, UPS in partnership with CVS made their first residential delivery by drone by dropping off prescription drugs from a CVS pharmacy directly to a consumer’s home.

As part of DRONELIFE’s participation in the FAA’s Drone Safety Awareness Week, DRONELIFE will feature stories according to the themes outlined. Today, we focus on drone delivery.

Guest Post: This article published with permission from our friends at DroneII, Drone Industry Insights. Article authored by Millie Radovic.

As high-profile drone delivery companies like Wing, UPS Flight Forward, and Zipline have made headline after headline this year, the hype around drone deliveries has become bigger than ever. But is it really all hype, or are we on the brink of major change in the way that goods are transported? Over the past two months DRONEII has conducted thorough research into the drone delivery market to bring you the latest market updates and answer all your burning questions. Here’s just a small snippet of the content that we’ve compiled into our latest Drone Delivery Report.

In the late ’90s, wildlife conservationists Zoe Jewell and Sky Alibhai were grappling with a troubling realization. The pair had been studying black rhino populations in Zimbabwe, and they spent a good deal of their time shooting the animals with tranquilizer darts and affixing radio collars around their necks. But after years of work, the researchers realized there was a major problem: Their technique, commonly used by all manner of wildlife scientists, seemed to be causing female rhinos to have fewer offspring.

The researchers published their findings in 2001, igniting a controversy in the conservation world. The problem, says Duke University professor of conservation ecology Stuart Pimm, is that being “collared” is extremely stressful for animals. “If you were walking through your neighborhood and suddenly a bunch of strange people came charging after you … and you got shot in the ass with a dart and woke up with something around your neck, I think you’d be in pretty bad shape too,” he says.

But Jewell and Alibhai had an idea. While working alongside the Shona tribe in Zimbabwe, they saw how the indigenous trackers were able to deduce an enormous amount of information about wildlife from animals’ footprints, including weight, sex, and species, all without getting anywhere close to the animals themselves. “We would go out with local game scouts, who were often expert trackers, and they would often laugh at us as we were listening to these signals coming from the collars,” Jewell says. “They would say to us, ‘all you need to do is look on the ground.”

While maybe not as riveting as your favorite movie, this video published by Amazon shows it’s current version delivery drone in action. It is worth noting that the takeoff and landings are on a identified platform landing areas. It also does not show the transfer of the items from pick-up to delivery but it does give you an idea of the flight pattern of the drone and the interesting way that it handles take off and landings.