Unmanned Systems Technology 033 l SubSeaSail Gen6 USSV l Servo actuators focus l UAVs insight l Farnborough 2020 update l Transforma XDBOT l Strange Development REVolution l Radio telemetry focus

22 In conversation | Daniel Buchmueller business ventures at Amazon – to deliver Amazon packages by UAV to customers’ backyards. And then we just started ordering COTS UAV parts with our own credit cards, excited to start building multi- copter aircraft that could accomplish this.” After assembling a team of technicians and coders to work nights and weekends, Bezos greenlit the project later that year, and in 2015 Buchmueller moved to Cambridge, UK, to build up Amazon’s new UAV development centre there. “In the US at that time there wasn’t a clear path for flight testing and developing UAVs, which was a huge risk to these sorts of programmes,” he says. “In the UK though, we were welcomed with open arms by the Civil Aviation Authority’s UAS team, and they provided immense ongoing feedback and support for our engineering, flight trials and operations. “Because it was England, it was often windy, which was great for proving out the limits of the UAV’s stability, and often cold, which meant we didn’t have to worry about motors or electronics overheating. By the end of 2016, one of my teams was able to accomplish the first real UAV-couriered delivery of a package to an Amazon customer – and of course, there’s ongoing development and testing in England to this day.” Project Vesper Following a roughly two-year sojourn from UAVs (spent as director of engineering at Flatiron Health, producing software to help accelerate cancer research), Buchmueller was approached by Dirk Hoke, CEO of Airbus Defence and Space, and Jana Rosenmann, head of Airbus’ UAS programmes. “Jana and Dirk wanted to develop commercial UAV programmes that could perform the same operations as helicopters across mapping, surveying and cargo operations but with far lower running costs. I was asked to start up and realise the cargo aspect,” he explains. “We did that in secret for about a year, and found a great partner in XAG, based in Guangzhou, which is one of the oldest UAV manufacturers in the world.” XAG and Buchmueller’s Airbus team built modified versions of the former’s P30 agricultural spraying quadcopter. In late November 2019, they launched Project Vesper in Guangzhou, a full delivery trial of cargo-carrying UAVs, to enable quick feedback cycles for critical updates on the UAVs. “The UAVs were equipped with parachutes and other safety systems, and approved for flight by the CAAC [Civil Aviation Administration of China], enabling us to fly these vehicles safely in an urban environment,” Buchmueller says. “UAVs aren’t always built safely; they could crash and hurt a lot of people. But XAG’s vehicles had millions of flight hours logged, and it all went fine.” Volansi’s Voly M20 Earlier this year, Hannan Parvizian, CEO of Volansi, asked Buchmueller to join as CTO. “Leading projects in a relatively small firm allows so much more engineering flexibility and focus than in large, comparatively unwieldy multinational corporations, and better incentivises efficiency too,” Buchmueller says. “In the latter, you’re required to double- and triple-check everything before you do it, and you risk losing your department’s budget if you don’t use it all. “On top of that, Volansi has attracted some world-class engineers, such as Steve Morris as vice-president of aircraft engineering, who created Martin UAV’s V-Bat [detailed in UST 15, August/ September 2017].” Although almost all his past UAS experience had been focused on last-mile delivery applications, Volansi’s Voly family of aircraft are being designed and built for ‘middle-mile’ operations, working over dozens of miles rather than ten or less. August/September 2020 | Unmanned Systems Technology A modified P30 quadcopter from XAG flies over Guangzhou as part of Airbus’ Project Vesper, another mass-delivery UAV project led by Buchmueller (Courtesy of Airbus)