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A2Z Drone Delivery Improves RDSX Pelican “With Eye on U.S Manufacturing”

A2Z Drone Deliv­ery, a devel­op­er of com­mer­cial drone deliv­ery solu­tions, has announced an improve­ment to its flag­ship craft the RDSX Pel­i­can, reports a press release. 

The release explains, “The Pel­i­can will now be offered with a more eas­i­ly mod­i­fi­able flight con­troller enabling cus­tomers to more read­i­ly inte­grate their cus­tomised flight sys­tems and com­pan­ion soft­ware with the extend­ed range hybrid VTOL deliv­ery drone.” 

It adds, “The open-source flight con­troller also rep­re­sents an impor­tant step in A2Z Drone Delivery’s move towards man­u­fac­tur­ing the pur­pose-built com­mer­cial drone in the U.S.”

The com­pa­ny says the Pel­i­can com­bines the reli­a­bil­i­ty and flight sta­bil­i­ty of a mul­ti-rotor craft with the extend­ed range of a fixed wing air­frame. With no con­trol sur­faces, the strong yet sim­ple design min­imis­es poten­tial points of fail­ure and decreas­es main­te­nance demands, while keep­ing it flight-ready longer. Also, the pay­load bay can be fac­to­ry-inte­grat­ed with the A2Z Drone Deliv­ery RDS2 winch, to sup­port a vari­ety of oper­a­tions includ­ing deliv­er­ies from alti­tude.

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Aaron Zhang, com­pa­ny Founder and CEO, com­ment­ed, “Ini­tial­ly, we designed the RDSX Pel­i­can to work with a pro­pri­etary flight con­troller, but we’ve found that cus­tomers sought expand­ed flex­i­bil­i­ty too.”

He con­tin­ued, “Mov­ing to the same open-source con­troller that every­one else uses allows cus­tomers to utilise A2Z’s own QGC ground con­trol sta­tion by default, or inte­grate their own con­trol sys­tems. This also means they can tai­lor the drone to max­imise the open-source PX4 frame­work with Mis­sion Plan­ner and oth­er com­mon­ly used soft­ware in our indus­try.”

Engi­neered to oper­ate with­in the FAA’s 55-pound max take­off weight for Part 107 com­pli­ance, the Pel­i­can is rat­ed to car­ry pay­loads of up to 5 kilo­grams on oper­a­tions for an up to 40 kilo­me­tres roundtrip. 

The flex­i­bil­i­ty of the Pelican’s car­go bay allows it to be used for many logis­tics mis­sions includ­ing aer­i­al map­ping, drone inspec­tion, forestry ser­vices, search and res­cue oper­a­tions, water sam­ple col­lec­tion, off­shore deliv­er­ies and min­ing.

The adop­tion of the open-source flight con­troller is also an impor­tant step­ping with the com­pa­ny’s eye on U.S man­u­fac­tur­ing. With the more flex­i­ble flight con­troller in place, it can now pro­ceed towards sourc­ing com­pa­ra­ble com­po­nents for the RDSX Pel­i­can plat­form which will to sat­is­fy NDAA com­pli­ance and even­tu­al­ly seek Blue UAS cer­ti­fi­ca­tion with the U.S DOD Defence Inno­va­tion Unit.

Aaron Zhang

Zhang point­ed out, “Our Test Facil­i­ty in Anji Coun­ty out­side Shang­hai, with its reg­u­la­to­ry envi­ron­ment that encour­ages BVLOS oper­a­tions, has enabled us to push the bound­aries of autonomous drone capa­bil­i­ties. We are mak­ing prepa­ra­tions to serve demand out­side pri­vate enter­prise oper­a­tors with ver­sions of the Pel­i­can aimed at being man­u­fac­tured in the Unit­ed States.”

With a base mod­el start­ing price of USD29,000, the A2Z Drone Deliv­ery RDSX Pel­i­can can be cus­tomised for most cus­tomer needs. A pop­u­lar con­fig­u­ra­tion is the fac­to­ry-inte­grat­ed RDS2 winch for deploy­ing and retriev­ing pay­loads from a safe alti­tude. This can also incor­po­rate a sim­ple ser­vo-release mech­a­nism that boosts the drone’s pay­load capac­i­ty or out­fit the air­frame with sen­sor arrays for test­ing mis­sions, spe­cial­ty cam­era sys­tems for aer­i­al inspec­tion, autonomous patrol and more.

For more infor­ma­tion

https://www.a2zdronedelivery.com

(Images: A2Z Drone Deliv­ery)

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