INTERVIEW: Grasshopper Air Mobility on redefining automated drone logistics for efficient last-mile deliveries

While the race to launch com­mer­cial eVTOL air­craft oper­a­tions moves clos­er to the fin­ish line, it’s also nice to go back to the begin­ning and speak with com­pa­nies which are just start­ing out on their jour­ney.

One such com­pa­ny is Grasshop­per Air Mobil­i­ty. The Barcelona-based start­up has got some excit­ing plans on the hori­zon and is releas­ing the design con­cept for its e350 Fly­ing Car­go Van at the city’s New Econ­o­my Week today (Thurs­day).

The e350 is an elec­tric, ful­ly autonomous VTOL drone capa­ble of trans­port­ing one pal­let of up to 350kg at 220km/h over 200 km ful­ly elec­tric, or 600 km hybrid hydro­gen-elec­tric, deliv­er­ing goods over 100km in just under 30 min­utes.

Grasshop­per Air Mobil­i­ty says that what sets the e350 apart is its abil­i­ty to tran­si­tion from fly­ing to dri­ving by fold­ing its wings, allow­ing for effi­cient last-mile ground nav­i­ga­tion.

The e350 autonomous­ly lands ver­ti­cal­ly, dri­ves to the final des­ti­na­tion, enters ware­hous­es or fac­to­ries, and han­dles auto­mat­ed load­ing, unload­ing, and charg­ing of its spe­cial­ized Car­go Con­tain­ers via a Charg­ing and Load­ing Sta­tion (CLS) — all with­out human inter­ven­tion.

It’s an excit­ing time for founder Jakob Saal­frank and his team, as they plan to put them­selves on the map and begin to attract investors into their propo­si­tion.

eVTOL Insights’ Exec­u­tive Edi­tor Jason Pritchard spoke with Jakob about the jour­ney so far and how the company’s planned prod­uct will work.

Thanks for talk­ing to me, Jakob, and good to catch up again. It’s an excit­ing month for you and the team. Can you share more details?

Jakob Saal­frank: “Hi Jason, it’s a plea­sure to speak with you! I am so excit­ed to tell you that we’re releas­ing our con­cept to the pub­lic. We’re updat­ing our web­site and now the big goal is to find clients. In the AAM world, that’s the chick­en and egg prob­lem; either you’re get­ting investors first or clients.

“Ini­tial­ly, we want­ed to get into the pas­sen­ger mar­ket, but found you have to spend $2 bil­lion before cer­ti­fy­ing a vehi­cle and before you can actu­al­ly prove your busi­ness mod­el. We’ve got our fin­gers crossed for the likes of Lil­i­um, Volo­copter, Archer etc. but the point is, no-one knows how it will work. It’s a bet on the future.

“We’re actu­al­ly tar­get­ing auto­mat­ed indus­tries; com­pa­nies which already have sys­tems in their ware­hous­es and fac­to­ries, because our drone will con­nect direct­ly to their sys­tems. But it’s very dif­fi­cult if you don’t have any visu­als to show. We had to devel­op our CONOPS, oper­a­tional cost and so on.

“That is more or less done, which is why we’re going pub­lic. We’re based in Barcelona and Span­ish news out­lets are cov­er­ing this [Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty] a bit. It’s about start­ing off on the right foot and ide­al­ly until the end of the year, we’ll cap­ture client inter­est and have a strate­gic part­ner to sup­port us in our prod­uct devel­op­ment.

“Our goal is to find one or mul­ti­ple part­ners to be able to say we need X amount of vehi­cles in order to do this kind of logis­tics sys­tem, and then we can go to an investor. This is the approach we’re going for.

Can you tell us more about that ‘light­bulb moment’ when you want­ed to launch Grasshop­per Air Mobil­i­ty?

JS: “The very first moment actu­al­ly came after High School. I’ve always said I would like to pos­i­tive­ly influ­ence soci­ety in some shape, way or form. After uni­ver­si­ty and trav­el­ling the world, I worked for an intra-logis­tics com­pa­ny SSI Schae­fer, which devel­ops auto­mat­ed ware­hous­es.

“I moved to Aus­tria and was liv­ing in Graz, with the com­pa­ny head­quar­ters 20 kilo­me­tres out­side of the city so I had to com­mute every morn­ing. It took me one hour and was a hor­ri­ble con­nec­tion; a bus, plus a train then a 20-minute walk. I did­n’t want to own my own car and even if I did, it would have tak­en 30 to 40 min­utes to dri­ve.

“I thought to myself ‘why don’t fly­ing cars exist and why could I not do this?’ I always believe if you’re aim­ing at the top of the tree, you might get to the low­er branch. But if you’re aim­ing for the moon, you might even get to the top of the tree. So that’s why I said I’m gonna go for the biggest idea that might seem crazy, but still could be pos­si­ble to achieve.

This is why this idea nev­er left my mind. I want­ed to devel­op a shared mobil­i­ty ser­vice of a car that can actu­al­ly dri­ve and fly. The goal should be that I can use it and my grand­fa­ther can use it as well. My vision is that when I’m at home in the morn­ing and need to get to work, I open the appli­ca­tion which tells me the near­est vehi­cle I can enter.

I’m dri­ving to a take-off spot, then I’m autonomous­ly fly­ing to the near­est land­ing spot and final­ly I’m dri­ving the last mile. It needs to work with these take­off and land­ing spots, because I don’t think it’s viable for every­body to just take off and land any­where.

It was then dur­ing a vaca­tion that I said to myself: ‘Why am I work­ing in a job that I don’t like? You only have one life, fol­low your dream.’ So after com­ing back to Aus­tria, I quit my job and moved to Barcelona, found­ed a com­pa­ny and secured some free­lance work which gave me a sta­ble income but also free time to focus on my pas­sion project.

Work­ing in star­tups is great, but found­ing your own com­pa­ny is a whole dif­fer­ent thing. Nobody tells you real­ly what to do. I began writ­ing a pitch deck, attend­ed some entre­pre­neur­ship events and went to last year’s Paris Air Show. I start­ed talk­ing to all these AAM com­pa­nies and accel­er­a­tors and asked them ‘what do you need from me to be inter­est­ing’. They said three things: a prod­uct, a team and trac­tion.’

So I start­ed the project with a load of peo­ple who applied to be co-founders of the busi­ness and had a big meet­ing. We start­ed to inves­ti­gate the solu­tion; it cer­tain­ly wasn’t going to be a pas­sen­ger eVTOL in the near-term. This would be some­thing we would explore in the future, but we want to devel­op that tech­nol­o­gy. What would make sense in that con­text?

We looked at all the oth­er car­go drones and saw none of them actu­al­ly solved that last mile prob­lem, nor incor­po­rat­ed indus­tri­al automa­tion. And so that’s when we decid­ed to do every­thing autonomous. We’re doing autonomous flight, autonomous dri­ve, auto­mat­ed load­ing, auto­mat­ed unload­ing, auto­mat­ed charg­ing. There will be no humans involved and instead focus on ‘Indus­try 4.0’.

With our design, we can car­ry 350kg over 200 kilo­me­tres. Look­ing at the whole indus­try, oth­er RAM car­go com­pa­nies are trav­el­ling about 800 to 1,500km, and then you’ve got the Urban Air Mobil­i­ty vehi­cles which are with­in 20 to 50 kilo­me­tres. So we said we also need to get into the range and addi­tion­al­ly alle­vi­ate the weight issue that elec­tric mobil­i­ty brings. There­fore, we’re also start­ing to inves­ti­gate hydro­gen, and now we under­stand that with this tech­nol­o­gy we can actu­al­ly get to 600km.

We have deeply analysed the mar­ket of com­pa­nies which use indus­tri­al automa­tion. It is a great niche because no oth­er car­go com­pa­ny can tar­get these — we’re the only one with a ded­i­cat­ed val­ue propo­si­tion for them. Plus, I have a back­ground in that exact indus­try and know all the intri­ca­cies. Now we’ve got the stage ready to present, move for­ward and look for clients, before mov­ing on to investors. And this is the sto­ry from a crazy idea, liv­ing in Aus­tria, to a high-tech auto­mat­ed car­go drone.”

How would the drone work when it is oper­a­tional? Can you give me an idea of the process?

JS: “Our cus­tomer would need to own their own ware­house or fac­to­ry. And prob­a­bly at least in the ini­tial stages, would have to have either a just-in-time man­u­fac­tur­ing need or phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal prod­uct. Some­thing that is urgent. Because we are going to be some­where on the range between a truck and a heli­copter. The truck is the most uni­ver­sal logis­tics tool for any goods,
and the heli­copter is the high price, high-speed tool that you only use in emer­gen­cies.

“We want to be a lit­tle bit more reg­u­lar. So what our sys­tem requires is a so-called CLS (Charg­ing and Load­ing Sta­tion). This needs to be set up at the client side. So it could be, for instance, region­al dis­tri­b­u­tion. Let’s imag­ine in Barcelona, at the air­port there are var­i­ous CLS sta­tions.

“At the CLS sta­tion, you would have a car­go con­tain­er. This car­go con­tain­er con­tains the bat­ter­ies and so they are charg­ing as the drone isn’t there. They’re being loaded as the plane lands as fast as pos­si­ble, then our drone might already be wait­ing. It picks up one of these charged and loaded con­tain­ers, dri­ves away, flies from the ver­ti­port on the client side, to a ware­house with­in a 200 to 600 kilo­me­tre range.

“It lands out­side at a pre­de­fined land­ing spot, i.e. a ver­ti­port or heli­port, and dri­ves inside. The drone has fold­able wings and propul­sion, so after land­ing, we’re fold­ing the wings inside to fit into the ware­house envi­ron­ment. It then turns around, revers­es onto an emp­ty CLS sta­tion and we drop the con­tain­er there. We’re dri­ving to anoth­er CLS sta­tion, pick­ing up the next car­go con­tain­er — ide­al­ly already loaded — dri­ving out and fly­ing away.

“For the sys­tem to work effi­cient­ly, there should always be some sort of goods to move. Ide­al­ly, all the play­ers in the sup­ply chain have these CLS sta­tions, and we also need to have com­pet­i­tive prices, so that it does make sense for the clients to use us. It does­n’t make sense to move pota­toes or apples, but it might make sense for large amounts of phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal prod­ucts or man­u­fac­tur­ing com­po­nents. This is essen­tial­ly how it will work.”