Swoop Aero, a drone firm, has received approval from Australia’s Civil Aviation and Safety Authority (CASA) to operate its drone logistics remote operations centre (ROC) at its Port Melbourne headquarters.
According to the company, the approval means it will be able to “operate like an international airliner” and centralise its operations in one location, including remotely monitoring its global operations across Oceania, Africa, and Europe, as well as piloting up to five drones beyond the physical view of the aircraft through a web interface.
Swoop Aero’s chief regulatory officer Zachary Kennedy said, “From a regulatory perspective, the ROC assures Swoop Aero is fulfilling the highest aviation and safety standards on a worldwide basis.”
Swoop Aero also announced that it expects to expand its remote pilot operation by one pilot to 30 drones in the following months, putting it on schedule to meet its objective of offering drone logistics services to one billion people by 2030.
The ROC will also continue to serve as a teaching resource for novice pilots, according to the business.
Swoop has been testing the deployment of its drones to deliver healthcare services to distant communities in Queensland and Victoria since last year. Following these trials, the company anticipates receiving approval to roll out its services in each state by the end of the year.
Swoop Aero’s drone network is underpinned by a combination of AWS cloud and machine learning technology, which allows the company to interact with air traffic control, unmanned traffic management systems, and manned aircraft in the same vicinity to ensure the drones can autonomously and accurately land safely when they are deployed, according to Swoop Aero CEO Eric Peck, who spoke at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Australia and New Zealand Summit on Thursday.
Peck noted that the company has created a hardware and software digital twin of its fleet, allowing it to have complete control over each aircraft and its 17 modules.
“We maintain an aircraft digital shadow in the cloud, and every module is tracked and its health monitored throughout the airplane’s lifecycle, from manufacturing to servicing to end-of-life by matching specific flight data and training that data using machine learning,” he explained.
“This fleet digital twin is maintained using a combination of Amazon AWS IoT Device Shadow Service and Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL database, with aircraft checking their shadows automatically and fleet managers accessing insights through online applications.”
“We can remotely update every single chip on every aircraft in an entire fleet using the digital shadow. It’s as simple as the plane starting up in the morning and informing that a five-minute update is required before we can begin flying for the day. This means we can monitor and upgrade our whole worldwide fleet from a single location in the AWS cloud.”
