One More Step Towards Commercial Drone Delivery
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A significant step towards commercial drone deliveries in the US. A drone company succeeded in meeting the FAA’s safety requirements. The FAA has authorized American Robotics to operate its Scout drone system without human operators on-site – Beyond-Visual-Line-of-Sight (BVLOS) of the operator.
The decision limits operations to areas with light air traffic and daylight visibility and requires the drone not to exceed the altitude of 400 feet.
The autonomous, AI-powered drone is equipped with acoustic Detect-and-Avoid (DAA) technology that enables drones to maintain a safe distance from other aircraft.
Automated BVLOS operations play an important role in the opening of the commercial sectors to the drone economy, including the agriculture and industrial verticals. Key to these operations is the use and FAA acceptance of new and innovative safety technologies, such as DAA sensors and software-enabled automation.
Each Scout drone “lives” within a weatherproof base station which enables autonomous charging, data processing and analysis at the edge, and data transmission. Once installed in the field, all facets of Scout’s operation are automated, unleashing the drones to gather and analyze ultra-high-resolution data multiple times per day for multiple years without human interference.
The base station serves as the nerve center and communication hub for Scout. ScoutBase autonomously processes the raw data collected on each flight and transmits the analyzed information to American Robotics’ cloud-based data centers.
A secure web portal and API enables remote interaction with the system, data, and resulting analytics anywhere in the world, according to dronelife.com.
Company officials said they can now begin safely operating their automated Scout platform for the benefit of the energy, infrastructure, agriculture, and security market verticals.
