Wingcopter’s drone technology wins double award at Lake Kivu Challenge in Africa

Unmanned eVTOL air­craft man­u­fac­tur­er Wing­copter has won two prizes in the fly­ing com­pe­ti­tion at the Lake Kivu Chal­lenge in Rwan­da, after impress­ing judges with a ful­ly auto­mat­ed deliv­ery of an emer­gency pack­age in just 12 min­utes.

The Ger­man start-up took part in the event in Feb­ru­ary, which was part of the 2020 African Drone Forum and the first of its kind on the con­ti­nent. Host­ed by the Rwan­dan Gov­ern­ment and inau­gu­rat­ed by Pres­i­dent Kagame, the forum aimed at show­cas­ing the advances in autonomous drone deliv­ery which can make a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence for iso­lat­ed com­mu­ni­ties and rur­al areas across Africa.

Mak­ing an announce­ment yes­ter­day (Tues­day), the organ­is­ing com­mit­tee named Wing­copter as the win­ner of the Emer­gency Deliv­ery cat­e­go­ry, and award­ed it a spe­cial prize for its safe­ty pro­ce­dures. The com­pa­ny also received £65,000 in prize mon­ey.

Tom Plüm­mer, CEO and Co-founder of Wing­copter, said: “We are very proud to be win­ners of the Lake Kivu Chal­lenge, as this chal­lenge and the African Drone Forum embody the inno­v­a­tive spir­it of human­i­tar­i­an aid and the African drone com­mu­ni­ty as well as the great poten­tial for sus­tain­able drone deploy­ments.

“We strong­ly believe that Wing­copter drones can leapfrog exist­ing infra­struc­ture by deliv­er­ing sig­nif­i­cant social and eco­nom­ic val­ue in Africa and beyond.”

The chal­lenge received 92 appli­ca­tions from 35 coun­tries, but only the top ten drone com­pa­nies were invit­ed to put their drones and oper­a­tors to the test through real-life sce­nar­ios at Lake Kivu.

Through­out three weeks of flights, Wing­copter impressed judges with a ful­ly auto­mat­ed deliv­ery of an emer­gency pack­age from a droneport on the main­land to Bugaru­ra Island, with a secure return land­ing.

The roundtrip, beyond visu­al line of sight flight, was 40km and com­plet­ed with­out a bat­tery swap. Wing­copter drones were able to com­plete the one-way route to the island with­in 12 min­utes, which would nor­mal­ly take more than 50 min­utes by boat. The pack­age drop-off required no land­ing or human inter­ac­tion.

As a result, Wing­copter has signed an ini­tial mem­o­ran­dum of under­stand­ing with a Rwan­dan start-up, with oth­ers like­ly to fol­low.

Seli­na Her­zog, Project Man­ag­er at Wing­copter, said: “Wingcopter’s goal is to devel­op long-term part­ner­ships with local gov­ern­ments, pri­vate sec­tor and donor organ­i­sa­tions through­out Africa.

“It is through these part­ner­ships that we will accom­plish the knowl­edge-shar­ing and train­ing of the local work­force, ulti­mate­ly empow­er­ing local stake­hold­ers to take over and scale oper­a­tions. We want our tech­nol­o­gy to give back to the com­mu­ni­ties where we oper­ate and cre­ate new per­spec­tives.”

Wing­copter has already suc­cess­ful­ly deployed a sim­i­lar type of on-demand vac­cine deliv­ery to 19 remote vil­lages in Van­u­atu, on behalf of the local Min­istry of Health and sup­port­ed by UNICEF.

It has also recent­ly announced a com­mer­cial part­ner­ship with UPS Flight For­ward to joint­ly devel­op the next gen­er­a­tion of pack­age deliv­ery drones.

It claims that ‘the com­bi­na­tion of UPS’ expe­ri­ence in logis­tics and its glob­al net­work with Wingcopter’s con­tact­less drone deliv­ery tech­nol­o­gy will put the two com­pa­nies in a bet­ter posi­tion to also con­tribute in the fight against the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic’.

For more infor­ma­tion about the Africa Drone Forum, vis­it https://www.africandroneforum.org/.