Swiggy, ANRA run drone trials

Food delivery unicorn Swiggy has partnered with integrated airspace company ANRA Technologies to run more than 300 delivery trials of food and medicines using drones.

The trials were part of a project awarded to the companies by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and the civil aviation ministry, and will help prepare for the next set of drone rules for Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations.

The companies claimed this was the first time such missions were done in India.

BVLOS refers to drone missions where the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) goes outside the usual visual range of the pilot. Such missions need complex technologies and mapping for successful execution.

The two companies said that a total of 352 drone trials were conducted totalling more than 100 flight hours, which covered 1,100km of “incident free operations”.

The flights used multi-rotor drones, which used ANRA’s SmartSkies CTR and SmartSkies DELIVERY platforms.

The two platforms provide drone operators with tracking, monitoring, deconflicting and other information crucial to conducting low-altitude BVLOS missions.

The tests were done by ANRA’s flight team at Indian Institute of Technology in Ropar, Punjab, and in Uttar Pradesh’s Etah district.

“The recently concluded pilot will help pave the way for usage of commercial drones in enabling the middle- and last-mile journey for our consumers,” said Dale Vaz, chief technology officer, Swiggy.

The firms said the project was meant to help develop “independent, self-directed, and scalable” systems to manage and monitor BVLOS drone operations at scale.

BVLOS operations require operators to factor in information such as terrain, possible obstacles, traffic and weather.