I was talking with our resident genius this morning about current projects. A few of them relate to commercial cargo drones; accelerometers, temperature gauges, kill switches, real-time point-to-point tracking, etc. When we think of current drone technology, the rough and tumble of a commercial aircraft does not seem to fit that well. When we look at the overall systemic angle, avionics, GPS tracking, advanced piloting skills and wireless operational suites, the long-term potential for the platform comes more into focus.
Does it deliver?
Commercial unmanned cargo systems flip the design criteria from “can it fly?” to “can it be trusted in the kind of weather and environmental conditions we will be operating in?” Failure is not an acceptable option, especially in delivering on promises made that need to be kept.
The bigger the bird, the bigger the battery pack? Maybe, it depends on the length of the “hops” and the type of payload you are looking to move around. Energy density determines commercial viability. This is why long haul aerial cargo is still limited, while ground and marine autonomy are moving with more rapidity.
Cargo systems also fly into operational environments, ports, warehouses, airfields. They often transit rural corridors. Autonomy works best where the variables are constrained. As we already noted in our ports posts, warehouses and ports are high potential investment opportunities, while the “posterchild” – urban food delivery- is still pretty messy.
A lot of the control architecture for commercial drone operations falls into the IoT field (no pun intended). Fleet management & uptime, onboard autonomy and the remote supervision elements are clear. These are nodes in an overarching system. You don’t want “it” to disappear over the horizon and vanish forever?
Stripping away the hype…
Ground autonomy is the biggest mover in the cargo space. Warehouse robots, port vehicles, mining trucks and agricultural autonomous vehicles exist and already working. Marine autonomy is underrated, because it is slightly out of mind. It works because payloads are bigger. It is comparatively easier to iterate and build modular systems on top of a floating platform, as opposed to fighting the complex constraints of an aerial platform.
Unmanned air cargo only works when it is tied into a stable nodal network. It has niche applications already in high value, low-weight cargo, medical supplies or remote access logistics. The crux is that “vehicles” of any type do not address the needs of logistics – the primacy is handoff points, energy points, maintenance and human interface locations. In other words; the vehicle is secondary, the system architecture is primary. It is not about small versus big. It is about dependable system design.
