Trail of medical delivery drones launched at Vikarabad

Hyderabad: Hepicopter, a medical delivery drone, has begun trials in Vikarabad as part of Telangana’s initiative ‘Medicine from the Sky’.  It was formally launched by Union Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia, IT Minister KT Rama Rao, and Education Minister Patlolla Sabitha Indra Reddy on Saturday.

Hepicopter is heavy payload, long range drone paired to a custom developed modular temperature-controlled box (patent pending) platform that can safely and reliably deliver multiple medical payloads simultaneously and improve access to vaccines, lab samples, and possibly on-demand medical products to primary health centers and sub-centers in rural, remote, and hard to reach areas.

In the first of its kind Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) trials, several drone consortiums are participating together to establish the use-case of long range drone based medical deliveries. The partners are from Drone Company, logistics, UTM Service Provider and a Healthcare and Cold chain expert as partners. The startup partners include Airserve, BlueDart Express, TechEagle Innovations, Dunzo, Marut Drones, Sagar Defence, Redwing Labs.

Prem Kumar Vislawath, founder, Marut Dronetech said the Hepicopter platform can support vaccination in remote areas by safely transporting about 2,000-5,000 doses of vaccines at 2-8 degrees in one trip over a straight-line distance of 20-40 kilometres. A pair of drones can fly around 10 trips every day to different health facilities transporting 40,000-1,00,000 doses and deliver them directly.

He explained, “Post Covid-19 vaccinations, the drone platform can support multi-payload regular scheduled delivery to health facilities. In one trip two to four temperature-controlled boxes can carry 2,000 vaccines or about 1,000 medicine doses or 40 blood samples or two units of blood in any combination over a straight-line distance of 20-40 kilometres. A pair of drones can fly around 10 trips every day to different health facilities and deliver directly. The drones will be flown from a custom-designed mobile launchpad, complete with fridges and freezers, continuous communication, and a real-time command center.”

Telangana Government-led ‘Medicine from the Sky’ project in collaboration with World Economic Forum, Niti Aayog, and Healthnet Global along with the Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) has granted the project with necessary exemptions and rights to fly drone flights on an experimental basis in Telangana.