AEROSPACE UAVs

Multirole lifesavers
A new approach to humanitarian drones​

TIM ROBINSON reports on a UK company pioneering an innovative concept for multirole humanitarian drones in Africa that has the potential to open up new areas to lifesaving services.

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By now, many readers will be familiar with the concept of using UAVs to provide urgent medical supplies such as blood or medicines to remote communities in the developing world. By using cheap drones, these initiatives are able to save lives in areas where road or ground infrastructure are limited or nonexistent at a fraction of the price of a helicopter or fixed wing medical supply. In Rwanda and now Ghana, for example, ZIPline has pioneered medical deliveries by UAVs with over 23,000 deliveries to date. Drones have also been used to deliver blood, vaccines and urgent medicine in Bhutan and New Guinea, as well as in Switzerland.

Urgent medicines or aid delivered by drone is also gaining ground in disaster or emergency scenarios where existing infrastructure has been destroyed and communities have been cut off.

However, despite the huge benefit of these ‘drones for good’ initiatives, they are still limited by the range and footprint of these small UAVs and therefore how many clinics, hospitals and communities they can connect with to make a viable network. Despite the lower cost of UAVs compared to crewed aircraft or helicopters, this means that for more dispersed villages and communities which are further apart. The price of a dedicated medicine delivery UAV service may be still be too much to make it viable.

Enter UAVAid

However, a UK company has now come up with a breakthrough that has the potential to open up far more communities and transform the provision of humanitarian aid with multirole UAVs, able to drop medical supplies and carry out other missions, and thus expand the business case and rationale far more.

THE AESA CERTIFICATION NOW OPENS THE DOOR TO OPERATING THE HANSARD UAV AROUND THE WORLD WITH AN INTERNATIONALLY RECOGNISED ‘SAFETY CASE’ ALREADY IN PLACE TO SUPPORT LOCAL FLIGHT APPROVALS

Formed in 2014, UAVAid is the brainchild of brothers Daniel and James Ronen who were motivated to examine the problem of urgent resupply of medicine and how to reduce the amount of wastage of temperature-sensitive vaccines in areas such as Sierra Leone – which frequently expire before they reach the point of use. Having talked to various stakeholders, they also found a need from other emergency response and relief agencies who were interested in drones, however, this time for mapping. Others, meanwhile, such as wildlife rangers, wanted live video.

Recalls Daniel Ronen: “At that point we came up with the concept of the multirole drone simply because what we needed to do was satisfy multiple markets on one platform. We did the very British thing of building a multifunction bit of kit, whereas the industry to that date (and to the best part now), has focused on specialist single-purpose drones.”

They hit on the idea of a multirole ‘tactical-sized’ civil UAV – which would be able to operate in remote areas with minimal infrastructure but still provide a highly capable platform able to rapidly switch functions based on the evolving needs of the local context.

UAVAid’s latest model, the Hansard V, is a multirole fixed-wing UAV with a 300km round trip cargo delivery range. It is powered by an internal combustion engine able to use locally available fuel, such as petrol, to ease logistics when operating in the developing world. It also features automated take-off and landing with a rugged landing gear that is able to operate from unprepared roads and rural airstrips.

The UAV features an air-dropped delivery package capability of up to 10kg of cargo on the underside and a nose-mounted sensor turret. The multi-purpose bay allows for swapping the parachute drop canister for a high-resolution camera module to achieve the mapping functionality, or even an additional fuel tank for longer endurance. The mapping unit can take 10,000 images at 2.3cm per pixel resolution with 90% overlap in under two hours – making it suitable for rapid 2D and 3D mapping.

These missions are obviously beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS), which is less of a challenge for deconfliction with other air traffic in the quieter skies of Africa. UAVAid use a layered approach for communication with short and long-range radios and satellite communications. This allows the drone to switch seamlessly between radios and the more expensive satellite communication at longer ranges only when necessary.

At the end of 2018, the Hansard UAV was awarded a Certificate of Airworthiness for Experimental Flight by Spain’s AESA, the first believed to ever be awarded to a humanitarian multipurpose drone in Europe. Over 30Gb of data was submitted to support the technical submission. Ronen remarked: “This was an enormous achievement because it meant obviously having to go through an extensive and robust certification process. We needed to prepare stress tests, operations procedures, air flow modelling, computer-generated models and more.”

This effort though is set to pay off as the AESA certification now opens the door to operating the Hansard UAV around the world with an internationally recognised ‘safety case’ already in place to support local flight approvals.

Flight trials in Malawi

Earlier this year, as part of the UK Department for International Development (DFID) Frontier Technology Livestreaming project, UAVAid deployed three of its Hansard V multirole UAVs to Malawi to perform humanitarian missions as part of a trial that was locally facilitated by UNICEF. “We owe a huge debt of gratitude and acknowledgement to UNICEF Malawi for their work in facilitating the local aspects of this project,” said Ronen.

UAVAid was determined that this trial would actually help the local community, rather than just be a proving ground for a British company with an innovative UAV. Says Ronen: “We wanted to ensure that our project would be of genuine benefit to the people of Malawi. How can we do that? Well – let’s actually support these guys to help them with antipoaching. Let’s not just simulate doing a medical delivery but actually do it. What do you guys in UNICEF want from mapping, you tell us where you need mapped and we’ll do that for you.”

This led to what is believed to be a world first – a single UAV being directly integrated into three separate public services as part of one short deployment (in fact this was achieved all in one day). This included directly integrating into Malawi’s medical supply chain – with local stakeholders engaging in the trial. The UAV was also used for ground mapping for UNICEF development purposes and performing survey functions hoovering up high-resolution imagery that could be used for agriculture, infrastructure and development projects. Thirdly, it was integrated with the Malawi ranger service for anti-poaching patrols. This saw rangers posted in the control station, controlling the aerial surveillance camera to monitor endangered species and spot any illegal hunting.

In operation, urgent medical resupply will typically take priority but the UAV is capable of taking on additional tasks on the same flight. Ronen explains “The beauty of the system is that it allows us to do more than one thing at the same time. With low operating costs and long endurance, we could, for example, support an area with anti-poaching, pop over to do a quick delivery, then on the way back carry on with the anti-poaching for a number of hours. We have an incredible amount of flexibility.”

Summary​

After this successful trial, UAVAid is aiming to expand on this innovative idea further to other areas and even other missions – such as pipeline or infrastructure patrol, fisheries protection, environmental management, deforestation and pollution monitoring etc – as well as disaster response. Ronen says on this game-changing idea: “The multirole capability fundamentally changes the economics and therefore the business model of operating drones in these remote areas – because you are not constrained by catering for just a single market.”

Ironically, Ronen believes that Africa and other parts of the developing world, where airspace restrictions are fewer and the issue of social acceptance and privacy arising from drones are lower priorities than in the West, will pioneer this emerging new field of multirole, highly affordable drone services. “The developing world will see this high technology solution implemented before the developed world. We’re going to see drones making routine flights in parts of Africa far before we see them flying over Chiswick.”

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