These drones can haul a 20-pound load for 500 miles and land on a moving target
These drones can haul a 20-pound load for 500 miles and
land on a moving target
By Lora Kolodny & Darren Weaver May 26, 2018 CNBC.com
A start-up called Volans-i is building drones that can
deliver heavy parts over long distances, even to a ship that's sailing at sea.
This kind of technology could have saved the Titanic, CEO and co-founder Hannan
Parvizian quipped.
The company shared footage of a recent test flight over
Lake Pleasant in Arizona with CNBC where its drones took off from and landed on
platforms attached to moving boats.
Volans-i's drones are able to travel for up to 500 miles
carrying 20 pounds of cargo at a time at a top speed of 200 miles per hour. (A
delivery from Los Angeles to San Francisco would take three to four hours.)
They are able to do this by employing fixed wings along with
vertical-take-off-and-landing systems for flight, and both batteries and fuel
for propulsion.
Because the Volans-i drones can take off or land on any
flat 15-by-15 foot platform, the company and its customers don't have to build
any special infrastructure to make or take deliveries.
Regulators are still figuring out how drones will be
allowed to operate in lower airspace above the U.S. But Volans-i is one of a
spate of companies that wants to become a next-generation, drone-based UPS,
Maersk or FedEx.
Competitors to Volans-i include a mix of start-ups and
titans in logistics including: Zipline, Flirtey, Matternet and Impossible
Aerospace; and Amazon and DHL.
While many drone delivery businesses have focused on the
food and medical supplies, Volans-i aims to deliver heavy parts and equipment
to factories, hospitals, construction sites and ships at sea.
CEO Hannan Parvizian was formerly an operations analyst
at Tesla. Working for the electric vehicle maker inspired his idea for the
company. He said:
"When I used to work at Tesla, we had this problem on
a daily basis of trying to deliver certain parts to our service centers
quickly, or get parts back to our main warehouse…Looking at the numbers, I
figured if someone could combine the use of drones with the component of b2b to
deliveries, this would be very helpful for us, and companies like ours."
Volans-i cofounder Wesley Guangyuan Zheng, an energy
storage expert, also worked for an electric vehicle company, Lucid Motors.
(Both have graduate degrees from Stanford, which is where they met.) Their
company is a graduate of the Y Combinator accelerator, and has so far raised
seed funding from Y Combinator and Lightspeed Ventures.
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