Drone Company to Launch Small Urgent Package Delivery in Ireland

无人机公司将在爱尔兰推出小型紧急包裹递送服务

This week, Manna Drone Delivery is planning to launch commercial operations of its custom-developed aerospace grade drones. The company claims it is the largest drone delivery operation in Europe, and has raised a total of $35 million in venture capital funding since 2018. Manna has been operating since 2020 in Ireland and has recorded about 5,000 real-world deliveries between the suburbs of Galway and Dublin. The team has also performed close to 90,000 test flights to date. The upcoming launch will happen in Balbriggan, a suburb of Dublin.

本周，甘露无人机交付计划启动其定制开发的航空航天级无人机的商业运营。该公司声称这是欧洲最大的无人机交付业务，并已筹集了总计3500万美元的风险投资资金2018年。一直在爱尔兰2020年运营，并记录了戈尔韦郊区和都柏林之间约5,000次真实交付。迄今为止，该小组还进行了近90,000次试飞。即将到来的发射将在都柏林郊区进行。

Manna’s head of U.S. operations, Andrew Patton, recently shared some details about the company’s progress and upcoming goals in an interview with Avionics International. “Expect to see partnerships with some extremely large multinational brands in the second half of 2022 or the first half of 2023—both in the U.S., where we will fly in 2022, as well as internationally,” he stated.

Manna的美国业务负责人安德鲁·巴顿最近在接受国际航空电子采访时分享了有关公司进展和即将实现的目标的一些细节。他表示: “预计将在2022年下半年或2023年上半年与一些非常大的跨国品牌建立合作伙伴关系，无论是在美国，我们将在美国2022年飞行，还是在国际上。”

One challenge that Manna’s team hopes to solve is determining how to connect unmanned aircraft system (UAS) traffic management with current manned air traffic management (ATM) surveillance systems. “There is still a lot of ambiguity as to how this looks at scale,” according to Patton. For Manna and other small UAS companies, the existing regulatory framework enables significant development. Patton explained, “The regulations—especially in Europe—allow us to get pretty far down the track for a long time, meaning it’s really on us to continue developing the technology, operations, and demonstrated expertise that the regulators are going to need to give us a set of rules that can truly allow us to scale without limitation.” Another important factor is Europe’s U-space regulatory framework, which will become applicable in early 2023.

团队希望解决的一个挑战是确定如何将无人驾驶飞机系统 交通管理与当前有人驾驶的空中交通管理 监视系统连接起来。巴顿说: “关于这看起来是如何从规模上看，仍然有很多模棱两可的地方。”对于其他小型无人机系统公司，现有的监管框架可以实现重大发展。解释说: “法规尤其是在欧洲使得我们能够在很长一段时间内走得很远，这意味着我们必须继续开发技术，运营，并证明了监管机构将需要为我们提供一套规则的专业知识，这些规则可以真正使我们不受限制地扩展规模。” 另一个重要因素是欧洲的监管框架，该框架将适用于2023年。

An advantage of Manna’s business model is the scalability that is enabled by the software platform they use to manage overall operations. “We have a lot of technology developed in-house,” Patton said. The company’s “simple but robust hardware and software in our system allow safe, simple operations,” in particular for last-mile deliveries in the U.S. and Europe. “We have utter commitment to the direct-to-backyard use case—extremely focused on suburbia, and on delivering at low cost,” he emphasized.

业务模型的一个优势是可伸缩性，这是由他们用来管理整体运营的软件平台所实现的。“我们内部开发了很多技术，” 巴顿说。该公司的 “简单但强大的硬件和软件在我们的系统中允许安全，简单的操作”，特别是在美国和欧洲的最后一英里交付。他强调说: “我们完全致力于直接到后院的用例 ，非常专注于郊区，并以低成本交付。”

Patton foresees improvements in mechanisms for electronic conspicuity being rolled out and adopted to facilitate integration of drones into the manned aircraft airspace. He added, “Very low-power ADS-B In receivers would be very interesting on low-altitude drones.”

预计将推出并采用电子醒目的机制，以促进将无人机集成到有人驾驶的飞机空域。他补充说: “在低空无人机上，接收器中的低功耗将非常有趣。”

He also predicts that urgent package delivery with low payloads will become ubiquitous in urban areas within the next 10 to 15 years. “It’s going to be far cheaper, more environmentally friendly, safer, and a more efficient, better customer experience than any other type of delivery,” Patton noted. With urgent package delivery, he said, the incremental cost of ordering items will ultimately drop to zero—much like ordering packages on Amazon Prime, where there is no added charge for delivery.

他还预测，在未来10到15年内，低有效载荷的紧急包裹交付将在城市地区无处不在。“它将比任何其他类型的交付更便宜、更环保、更安全、更高效、更好的客户体验，” 巴顿指出。他说，有了紧急包裹交付，订购商品的增量成本最终将降至零，像在亚马逊上订购包裹一样，那里没有额外的交付费用。

Long-term, Manna Drone Delivery’s team intends to focus on vehicle safety, reliability, speed of delivery, and minimization of carbon footprint, as well as the development of technologies to accomplish these goals. “We will contribute a lot with hardware development or overall system development,” Patton said. “We also want to be a good actor: we think a lot about how this fits into a manned traffic management system where other companies might join us in the skies in a safe and organized way. We think about how that UTM system connects to manned aviation and how we ensure safety there, and how we integrate with retail, broadly speaking.”

从长远来看，团队打算专注于车辆安全性，可靠性，交付速度和碳足迹的最小化，以及实现这些目标的技术开发。“我们将在硬件开发或整体系统开发方面做出很大贡献，” “我们也想成为一名好演员: 我们对这如何适应载人交通管理系统进行了很多思考，其他公司可能会以安全和有组织的方式加入我们的天空。从广义上讲，我们考虑系统如何与载人航空连接，以及如何确保那里的安全，以及如何与零售整合。”