Moya Aero awarded a grant to boost cargo drone development

Moya Aero has been award­ed a $2 mil­lion grant to con­tin­ue work on devel­op­ing its Moya eVTOL from the FINEP, a Brazil­ian gov­ern­ment orga­ni­za­tion that pro­motes sci­ence, tech­nol­o­gy, and inno­va­tion.

In part­ner­ship with Helisul Drones, Alba­tross, and Cer­ti­fi­ca Drone, Moya Aero was one of two com­pa­nies award­ed among 15 final­ists. The grant will sup­port the next steps of the first eVTOL for car­go ded­i­cat­ed to logis­tics appli­ca­tions aim­ing at greater pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and effi­cien­cy.

Moya Aero was found­ed in 2020 by Alexan­dre Zaramela and Rena­ta Pao­lil­lo as a spin-off of ACS Avi­a­tion, Brazil’s lead­ing aero­nau­ti­cal engi­neer­ing, research, and air­craft devel­op­ment enti­ty locat­ed in the heart of Latin Amer­i­ca’s aero­space indus­try cor­ri­dor, São José dos Cam­pos.

This expe­ri­ence is behind the Moya eVTOL, the first autonomous, high-capac­i­ty, all-elec­tric vehi­cle being built in the South­ern Hemi­sphere. Pay­load is claimed to be ten times greater than cur­rent small con­ven­tion­al drones up to 25 kg.

Alexan­dre Zaramela, Co-Founder and CEO of Moya, said: “We are hon­ored to receive this sup­port from the FINEP, which we see as a tes­ta­ment to the impor­tance of devel­op­ing zero-emis­sions vehi­cles. Our mis­sion is to build a car­go drone that will fill a gap in the mar­ket to serve remote and unas­sist­ed areas by con­ven­tion­al trans­port.”

The Moya eVTOL is said to spray six times more hectares per hour than small con­ven­tion­al drones, and cov­ers more area to reach places where tra­di­tion­al crop dusters can­not oper­ate, with greater pre­ci­sion to min­imise dis­per­sant drift. It claims 50% low­er oper­at­ing costs com­pared to heli­copters.

With a max­i­mum range of 110 km and a cruise speed of 150 km/h, endurance is 42 min­utes on a 105 hectare per bat­tery cycle. The lithi­um-poly­mer bat­tery (LiPo) uses sol­id poly­mer for the elec­trolyte and lithi­um for one of the elec­trodes, with a bat­tery capac­i­ty of 83 kWh. The engine utilis­es four elec­tric brush­less rotors with a max­i­mum of 62 kW per rotor.