EHang showcases ability of its AAVs during coronavirus outbreak

EHang has suc­cess­ful­ly demon­strat­ed the suit­abil­i­ty of its autonomous aer­i­al vehi­cles (AAV) when trans­port­ing emer­gency med­ical sup­plies and per­son­nel, as part of China’s response to the coro­n­avirus out­break.

As part of exer­cis­es organ­ised by local author­i­ties in Feb­ru­ary to pre­vent and con­trol the virus, Ehang’s unmanned two-seater AAV trav­elled four kilo­me­tres from Hezhou Square to Hezhou’s Peo­ple Hos­pi­tal, land­ing on a 25-storey rooftop before auto­mat­i­cal­ly return­ing after the deliv­ery.

Edward Xu, EHang’s Chief Strat­e­gy Offi­cer, was also a pas­sen­ger in a 4km autonomous flight from Hezhou City Cen­tre and land­ed safe­ly on the rooftop of the hos­pi­tal, as part of a series of urban pas­sen­ger-car­ry­ing flights.

Mr Xu said: “I’m proud to be one of the pas­sen­gers to take the ini­tial autonomous flights for med­ical emer­gency trans­port, and enjoyed the safe, fast and smooth jour­ney. In urban emer­gency sit­u­a­tions, this enables peo­ple or goods to be trans­port­ed effi­cient­ly across the city in near­ly straight-line routes. 

“More impor­tant­ly, as a pas­sen­ger, I was free to enjoy my tea and urban scenery dur­ing the whole flight as every­thing was auto­mat­i­cal­ly pilot­ed. Such suc­cess­ful flights have demon­strat­ed EHang’s capa­bil­i­ties in deliv­er­ing safe and high qual­i­ty AAVs to meet mis­sion-crit­i­cal demands in real life. We will con­tin­ue to imple­ment more UAM appli­ca­tions.”

The suc­cess of the tri­al opens up the poten­tial for more vehi­cles to be used when trans­port­ing med­ical sup­plies to hos­pi­tals, which is cur­rent­ly being done via ambu­lances and heli­copters.

EHang has said its AAVs can cov­er the radius of Hezhou, said to be about 15km, and have a cruis­ing speed of up to 90km/h. The com­pa­ny added trans­port mis­sions could also be under­tak­en at night.