Food delivery unicorn Swiggy has partnered with integrated airspace company ANRA Technologies to run over 300 delivery trials of food and medicines using drones.
The tests were part of a project awarded to companies by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and the Ministry of Civil Aviation, and will help prepare for the next set of drone regulations for Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations.
The companies claim that such missions have been done for the first time in India.
BVLOS refers to drone missions where the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) moves outside the normal visual range of the pilot. Successful execution of such missions requires complex technologies and mapping.
The two companies said a total of 352 drone tests were conducted over more than 100 flight hours, covering 1,100 km of “incident-free operation”.
The flights used multi-rotor drones, using ANRA’s SmartSkys CTR and SmartSkys Delivery Platform.
The two platforms provide drone operators with tracking, surveillance, deconflicting and other information critical to conducting low-altitude BVLOS missions.
The tests were conducted by ANRA’s flying team at the Indian Institute of Technology in Ropar, Punjab and Etah district of Uttar Pradesh.
“The recently concluded pilot will help pave the way for the use of commercial drones to enable middle and last mile travel for our consumers,” said Dale Vaz, Swiggy’s chief technology officer.
The firms said the project was to help develop “independent, self-guided and scalable” systems for managing and monitoring large-scale BVLOS drone operations.
BVLOS operations require operators to factor in information such as terrain, potential obstacles, traffic and weather.
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