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97 Trinity F90+ Covid-19 sample courier | In operation licences and payloads would be routinely available – is a fraction of the several hours needed for road deliveries, which also made a strong case for switching to UAV deliveries. Recovery and results The post-landing steps were brief. The researchers at the laboratory removed the payload compartment by hand, confirmed that the test tubes were undamaged and thus that they could have been used to transport blood or other samples safely, then stowed the UAV. All the relevant flight data was collected and stored in the mission planning software, while the absence of a payload camera eliminated the need for any post-mission survey analytics. “Future iterations of this mission, and others like it, will make greater use of the robotic arm we had at the start, as part of our droneport concept,” Busse adds. “The inertial data from each UAV’s autopilot can easily be transmitted to the arm so it can position itself under the aircraft to ‘catch’ it, compensating for any drift, gusts and so on. Once it has secured the UAV, it can then swap payloads and battery packs. “We’re also experimenting with other means of mating the arm and UAV dynamically, such as using QR codes, RFID chips or RTK-GPS tracking,” he says. “Once we have that post-flight ‘unit’ more clearly defined, the droneports might not just be static things. We could have ships or trucks for mobile deployment of the UAVs across areas with multiple application requirements for the vehicle to perform, or requirements that change during the day. Our experiments will eventually look into training the UAVs and robotic arms to perform recovery on such moving platforms.” As an example, Busse points to cases of helicopters landing on ships, a deeply dangerous operation that only highly experienced pilots are cleared to perform. However, Quantum-Systems’ autopilots, and by extension their robotic arms, can compensate to securely grab their UAV from the air with no risk of damage, greatly minimising the need for human pilots and potentially the need for maintenance technicians to routinely carry, stow or check the UAV afterwards. Hirt says, “We envision the UAV landing in a droneport, with some mechanism in place to unload the test tubes and put them in a container for automated last-mile transport, sorting and distribution to the test machinery, with nobody touching it. In the case of this trial though, which was mainly for the BVLOS fight and safe transport of the tubes, a doctor came out of the lab and retrieved the test tubes from the container, to put them in the lab.” The future As discussed, future trials will see different types of payload boxes with different insulation, tracking and security systems to be tested, including ones with temperature insulation, GPS tracking and person-specific intelligent locks. “There are also some regulatory hurdles to cross, beyond just aviation,” Hirt adds. “Medical authorities have yet to certify the use of autonomous transport for research samples, so trials like these and the results of them are important for making the case for UAVs and droneports to support their applicability. Busse says, “With the success of this project with Becker & Kollegen, we re-sent our proposal to the Ministry of Infrastructure for hospital-to-hospital deliveries, and we anticipate a positive response from them. We will therefore be trialling and developing our medical supply flight infrastructure to see how our droneports should be laid out to best suit the needs of the medical sector. “Future work and discussions are really needed though, to cut out the over- regulation of UAS flights and replace that with just a few streamlined, context- appropriate rules for approving and coordinating unmanned aircraft traffic, because right now, even the authorities don’t know quite what they’re doing. More projects like these need to be done just to drive home to the authorities how safe and useful this new technology is, and how easy regulating BVLOS missions could be.” As Hirt and his colleagues see it, the NTSD concept might also be realised using autonomous road vehicles, perhaps for last-mile deliveries between droneports and laboratories. Driverless cars also eliminate human interference, and using them for the last mile would preclude them from encountering traffic delays on major highways. “Ultimately, what we’d like best is to somehow, some day, eliminate the need for any transport at all, but we’re nowhere near there yet,” Hirt notes. “In the meantime, autonomous systems provide exactly the kind of speed, security and flexibility we need.” Unmanned Systems Technology | October/November 2020 Trinity F90+ Tiltrotor fixed-wing UAV Battery-electric MTOW: 5 kg Wingspan: 2.394 m Payload capacity: 700 g Endurance: 60-90 minutes or more (locked via programming depending on regulations) Operating airspeed: 33 knots Operating temperature range: -12 C to 50 C Key suppliers FPV camera: DJI Batteries: Samsung Foam parts: Multiplex ESC: Wurth Electronics Servos: Hitec ADS-B: uAvionix GNSS: uBlox Flight controller: STMicroelectronics Specifications