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Tech Brew

Drones

Jordyn Grzelewski

techbrew.com

Northern Michigan is famously scenic, with access to three Great Lakes and ample opportunities to see peak fall foliage.

But its roadways don’t always provide the most direct route. That’s just one of the challenges of delivering healthcare services, according to Tracy Cleveland, VP of supply chain for Munson Healthcare, the region’s largest healthcare system.

“The drives are beautiful at any time of year, but they meander, and so it takes time to get from Point A to Point B,” Cleveland told Tech Brew.

But what if you could skip the roads altogether? That’s what Munson Healthcare is testing out with a program that transports laboratory samples via drone. Eventually, leaders would like to scale it up to serve multiple uses, like delivering prescriptions to patients, and for other healthcare providers to replicate the model.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer earlier this year signed an executive directive promoting advanced aerial mobility, with the state’s Office of Future Mobility and Electrification (OFME) responsible for leading the state’s strategy. The effort aims to support the development and commercialization of drone tech for use cases ranging from 

 to moving automotive parts between plants.

Last year, OFME teamed up with the Michigan Department of Transportation’s aeronautics division to establish the Advanced Aerial Mobility Activation grant program, which aims to help build out infrastructure and enable drone deployments. The fund has awarded about $10 million to date.

“It does provide us the opportunity to showcase how we can have diverse applications for drones and advanced air mobility,” Justine Johnson, Michigan’s chief mobility officer and leader of the OFME, told us, “whether that’s in healthcare, whether that’s in public safety, whether that’s in agriculture, whether that’s in defense, this is enabling all of those applications to come to life.”

One of the grant recipients was Traverse Connect, an economic development agency in northern Michigan, for the Munson Healthcare drone pilot project.

Munson conducted the first phase, using drones from startup Blueflite, in May.

Typically, Cleveland explained, Munson Healthcare uses road transportation for tasks like delivering lab samples.

“The van goes on a defined route, and it picks up all the samples on the route, and it delivers them to the laboratory,” he said. “Then that laboratory will take those samples in and set up a big batch and process them. And then they wait for the next batch.”

“What we already saw in our proof of concept is that we can make more trips with the samples that are available, and the equipment can run continuously,” he added. “It’s more efficient for the laboratory. It’s results faster to the physician who ordered the test. It’s therapy faster to the patient who had the sample drawn.”

During the initial phase, Munson Healthcare tripled daily deliveries of supplies to locations like surgery and dialysis centers. Factors like wind speed, weather conditions, and temperature were taken into account; Cleveland said there was no difference in drone-delivered samples versus those delivered by traditional methods, and no sample loss or spoilage.

The second phase will involve beyond-line-of-sight flights, with lab samples remaining the focus for now. Additional grant funding will allow the program to add new drones, Cleveland said.

“How do we continue to think about critical supplies and lab samples that need to get from Point A to Point B, and really being that connecting force for rural communities?” Johnson asked. “I think this is such a great example.”

Cleveland said he’s heard from leaders from other rural healthcare systems who are interested in learning about how the program could work in their service areas.

“This is so right for a rural community,” he said. “Munson Healthcare serves 11,000 square miles of northern Michigan, and it’s a challenge to provide and maintain access to what we are offering. This is a very innovative way to serve our communities.”

A Blueflite drone with "Munson Healthcare" on the side

How a rural Michigan healthcare system is using drones to improve care

With support from the state, Munson Healthcare is piloting drone technology to deliver lab samples.

Glazed or frosted? Chocolate or blueberry? Drive-thru or drone-delivered?

The first two choices should be familiar to anyone who’s ordered a donut. The last one might be relevant in the not-too-distant future as drone technology takes off.

That vision was on display last week at Michigan Central’s Drone Day, when hundreds of Detroit students gathered at the technology campus to see drones in action—and to learn about training and career opportunities in advanced aerial mobility.

One of the main showcases of the day was a drone delivery that sent boxes of donuts to workers at a park on the Detroit River. Piloting the flight was Davontay Delacerda, 18, of Detroit, who took advantage of training programs at Michigan Central to obtain the FAA license needed to fly drones commercially, and now works for urban drone delivery startup Aerialoop.

“It was really exciting, at such a young age, too,” Delacerda said. “I’m just 18 and I started when I was 16. So it’s a really great journey, and pretty big things to be working for.”

An Aerialoop drone on the rooftop of Newlab at Michigan Central with the Detroit skyline in the background.

The demonstration fits into a broader effort at 

, a former train depot, to promote advanced aerial mobility and help the state 

 in a market that is expected to grow to tens of billions of dollars in the coming years.

Leaders at the tech campus worked with the Michigan Department of Transportation to establish an Advanced Aerial Innovation Region that allows for urban testing of drone technology within a three-mile radius. The zone is equipped with a beyond-visual-line-of-sight system that helps operators monitor low-altitude airspace. Year to date, the campus has served as the launchpad for more than 800 flights.

And over the last two years, the state’s Advanced Aerial Mobility Fund has given out more than $10 million to support projects in the sector.

“We’re building out a statewide strategy that also is inclusive of defense and commercial-related opportunities and activities,” Justine Johnson, Michigan’s chief mobility officer, told Tech Brew. Some priorities for the state include defense, agriculture tech, and B2B logistics. The auto industry, for example, could use drones to ferry components to plants.

For the donut demonstration, Michigan Central teamed up with Aerialoop and Yellow Light Coffee & Donuts to complete what was billed as the longest-ever delivery flight from the site. The 2.3-mile route took a drone transporting donuts to Hart Plaza on the Detroit River.

“This is designed to be a showcase for the future of autonomous aerial mobility and demonstrate the real-world applications of what you can do when you provide these technologies in a real-world urban environment like Detroit,” Matt Whitaker, director of Michigan Central’s mobility innovation platform, said from a rooftop featuring a 900-square-foot launchpad.

Michigan Central’s Drone Pilot Certification Training has helped more than 20 students get their FAA certifications, and the campus now offers drone programming for adults, as well.

The goal, Whitaker said, is not just to demonstrate that the tech works, but to help startups commercialize various applications and to create job opportunities for the community. He pointed to use cases like infrastructure inspection, first response, and medical delivery as some of the ways the tech can be most useful.

“We’re not here to do a one-day thing and then disappear. Demonstrations are fantastic,” he told Tech Brew. “But we want operations that are here consistently, operating at a scale that will actually truly impact our community…We want that drone flying daily, moving things between one warehouse and another, so that we can create the next generation of mobility.”

Pilot Davontay Delacerda crouches next to a drone on a rooftop launchpad.

Detroit showcases aerial mobility know-how with drone-delivered donuts

The demonstration was part of Michigan Central Drone Day, an event that highlighted the state’s burgeoning efforts around advanced aerial mobility.

Patrick Kulp

Alphabet-owned Wing is betting on a bigger future for the technology with a new aircraft that can handle delivery boxes of up to five pounds, doubling the capacity limit of the company’s currently operating drones. Wing claims the fleet addition will give it more versatility in accommodating a range of order types for companies like Walmart, DoorDash, and healthcare logistics startup Apian.

 The rollout comes as a number of factors seem to be aligning in favor of a 

 for the long-discussed means of fulfilling retail orders in the coming year.

Among the biggest, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) removed a key regulatory hurdle last year when it granted a handful of drone operators—including Wing—permission to fly beyond the visual line of sight (BVLOS), meaning they no longer need human spotters.

“This marks a paradigm shift in the way US regulators are approaching approvals for these types of advanced BVLOS drone operations,” Wing CEO Adam Woodworth wrote in a blog post. “We believe 2024 will be the year of drone delivery.”

Meanwhile, Walmart recently expanded its partnership with Wing and Zipline, another drone delivery service, to cover up to 75% of households in the greater Dallas-Fort Worth area. Other companies, like Amazon, also expect to expand drone delivery service this year.

 Woodworth claimed a variety of air-ferrying options will be necessary to most efficiently connect clients and their customers. The company’s newest aircraft draws on an existing “library” of designs.

Like other models of Wing drones, the new craft will be able to traverse round trips of 12 miles and cruise at around 65 miles per hour. The company said that while its current drones, which can lift 2.5-pound payloads, are able to field 70% of all US orders, the remaining 30% of trips require two drones.

That’s where the bigger craft will help, Woodworth said. “Think of it like how airlines operate different aircrafts for different routes: This new aircraft will streamline our deliveries of larger orders,” Woodworth wrote in a blog post. “For example, you could order last-minute ingredients for dinner—pasta, marinara sauce, Parmesan cheese, canned olives, and garlic.”

 and retailers have been developing drone delivery systems for years, but the technology has faced a long regulatory road, safety concerns, and 

 of cheaper, faster, and more sustainable 

Wing said it intends to work with partners and regulators to launch the bigger drone within the next year.

Google’s Wing debuts bigger delivery drones as tech gains momentum

A cleared regulatory hurdle could make 2024 a big year for drones.

Cartoon rendering of Hayden Field's headshot

Hayden Field

Zipline is gearing up to launch Japan’s first long-distance commercial drone deliveries.

It’s the SF-based startup’s first foray into Asia. As part of the program, which debuted yesterday but officially kicks off in May, flights will carry hundreds of medical supplies to hospitals and pharmacies in Japan’s Gotō Islands. The flights are powered by a partnership with Toyota Tsusho Corporation, the Toyota Group’s trading arm.

Since its 2014 founding, Zipline has been steadily expanding the autonomous drone delivery market, especially overseas—delivering blood in Rwanda and Covid-19 vaccines in Ghana. So far, it has made more than 280,000 deliveries worldwide.

For comparison, Alphabet-owned Wing passed the 200k delivery milestone last month.

: manufacturing its own drones, and developing the end-to-end delivery process, including logistics software and takeoff-and-landing processes. As part of the partnership, Toyota Tsusho created a new subsidiary to manage the operations in Gotō including a warehouse and distribution center.

 You could say Zipline had a very good 2021. Not only did the startup’s June funding round net $250 million at a $2.75 billion valuation, but it also inked autonomous delivery plans with Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya, and three states in Nigeria, according to the company. Zipline also formalized a small-scale partnership 

Zipline drone taking off to deliver a Walmart package in Arkansas

 The drone delivery unicorn now has operations in Africa, Asia, and North America.

Zipline will start delivering medical supplies in Japan next month

Last week, ice cream fell from the sky in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

No, it wasn’t raining dairy and waffle cones: It was part of Wing’s first on-demand drone delivery service in a major US metropolitan area, something the Alphabet-owned company and its partner, Walgreens, 

The new service allows drones to deliver health and wellness products, pet medication, and first aid kits—and, yes, ice cream—to “tens of thousands” of homes in the towns of Frisco and Little Elm. That makes DFW the world’s largest metropolitan area with access to on-demand drone delivery, according to Wing, although only a portion of the city is covered as of now.

One key factor limiting coverage: The FAA requires that any drone operator keep the device within unaided eyesight (read: no binoculars) of a visual observer at all times during its flight.

The drones have limited capacity, too: Packages must weigh less than 2.6 lbs.

Emerging Tech Brew chatted with Alexa Dennett, Wing’s head of communications, about Wing’s plans for scalability, regulatory approval, and more.

Wing’s drones start their official journey from Walgreens parking lots, with no slingshot or drone launch pad. Walgreens employees will pack orders in boxes and, once an order is ready, a drone will fly over from its charging site, hover at about 100 feet, and lower its hook. An employee will attach the box, and the drone will follow its autonomously-charted flight route, automatically unclipping the package from its hook when it reaches a customer’s yard.

Dennett called this the “store-to-door” model, and said last week was the first time Wing has tried it out in the US.

“It’s Walgreens in control of fulfilling all of that order, and that’s the first time this has happened,” Dennett said. “So we’ve been focusing on making that process efficient, and this is how we believe that the Wing drone delivery will scale in the United States and globally.”

There’s “absolutely no human in the loop” when it comes to deciding where to lower the package, charting the drone’s flight, or navigating it back to its charge pad, Dennett said.

“From the very moment that, say, a customer orders ice cream, Wing’s systems program a very safe and energy-efficient route for the drone to fly from its charge pad to picking up the ice cream, to delivering it, and all the way back again.”

 “We have pilots overseeing the flights of our drones, and they can intervene on an exceptions basis,” Dennett said. “So in the very, very unlikely incident that anything goes wrong, the pilot overseeing multiple drones can make a decision to ask the drone to land where it is or in the nearest safe area to land.”

Dennett added that when it comes to pilots overseeing a group of drones, the ratio “differs wildly between countries”—although each pilot oversees up to eight drones in Wing’s DFW operations, “that number is significantly increased” in Australia and Finland.

The company declined to comment on the specifics of its machine-learning models or autonomous training processes.

“Like all companies, I think, we’ve had our challenges,” Dennett said. “Our rate-limiting factor for expansion hasn’t been our ability to produce drones….In the United States, what has been our rate-limiting factor is really regulation.”

For the company’s Walgreens partnership in DFW, Wing needed to place visual observers in elevated areas along the route to satisfy legal requirements.

Dennett added that in Wing’s Australia and Finland operations, regulations allow the company to fly “beyond visual line of sight, without any visual observers,” which has allowed the company to “demonstrate the ability of our technology to do a lot more.”

 From January 1 to March 1 of this year, Wing performed 30,000 flights, and last year, it delivered more than 100,000 packages worldwide—most of them occurring in Australia. The company is racking up milestones, but for context: Amazon delivered about 11.5 million packages every single day in 2020.

It's Wing’s first on-demand drone delivery service in a major US metropolitan area.

Wing brings its ‘store-to-door’ model to the US with Dallas-Fort Worth deliveries

Dan McCarthy

What’s smaller than a plane, bigger than a drone, and the latest addition to FedEx’s delivery tech experiments?

An autonomous, hybrid-electric vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) system called Chaparral, which was 

 by the aviation startup Elroy Air earlier this year. This morning, FedEx announced that it will conduct a first-of-its kind test of Elroy’s cargo-carrying autonomous VTOL, sometime in “early 2023.”

The tests, in which the VTOL will ferry goods between FedEx sortation locations, will be Elroy’s first pilot within a real-life, commercial logistics operation. 

Elroy claims the aircraft can carry 300–500 pounds of cargo for up to 300 miles, and do so in a way that’s faster, cheaper, and more fuel-efficient than ground transport or manned aircraft. It also says the aircraft’s 

 vertical takeoff makes it a more flexible logistics option than a normal plane—there’s no runway needed, for instance.

For reference, the drones used by companies like 

 are capable of carrying packages that weigh only a few pounds.

The companies are still evaluating the range and weight for the upcoming tests, according to Kofi Asante, VP of strategy and business development for Elroy Air.

Elroy, which was founded in 2016 and has raised $56 million in venture funding to date, also has agreements in place to provide 500+ Chaparral aircraft to commercial, defense, and non-profit customers. It says these agreements amount to $1+ billion in demand. 

The company also has contracts with the US Air Force and a partnership with NASA.

For its part, FedEx is specifically interested due to the Chaparral’s potential as a “middle-mile” solution, referring to the transport of goods from one facility (e.g. a port or warehouse) to another (e.g. retail store or distribution center). Next year’s FedEx pilots will provide an initial testing ground for many of the company’s claims around efficacy in this space.

 to be worth nearly $325 billion by 2040, per a report from the Aerospace Industries Association and management consultancy Avascent.

The plane, created by Elroy Air, is designed to carry 300-500 pounds and travel 300 miles.

FedEx will run first commercial test of an autonomous vertical takeoff and landing craft in 2023

In August 2021, Wing announced a milestone: After about 2.5 years of operations, the Alphabet-owned drone-delivery company had dropped off its 100,000th package.

Now, six months later, the company says it has crossed the 200,000-commercial-deliveries line.

Drone delivery is still in its very early stages—Amazon alone delivers millions of packages each 

 as a lower-emission way to quickly deliver small packages. For context, Wing’s drones can handle up to 2.6 pounds.

Wing’s growth is powered by its Australian operations, which include partnerships with grocery and food chains (including KFC, which it claims was the most-demanded merchant), and says it has made over 30,000 drone deliveries so far this year.

It operates in the Australian capital of Canberra, as well as in Logan, a suburb of Brisbane.

For comparison, drone-delivery startup Zipline, which mostly operates in Rwanda and Ghana and specializes in delivering medical products like vaccines and blood, says it has made over 225,000 commercial deliveries to date.

Zipline recently formalized a partnership with Walmart—a leading tryer-outer of drone-delivery tech in the US—to run a 

 drone-delivery program in Northwest Arkansas.

In the US, one of the biggest barriers to scaled-up drone delivery is regulation. Until the FAA figures out how to safely and comfortably integrate the tech into existing airspace frameworks, the tech will have a low ceiling in the country.