The project to test drone deliveries will arrive in Tel Aviv in October

After almost 4,000 flights of drones in the skies of Hadera and Netanya, the project to test drone deliveries will arrive in Tel Aviv in October.
The venture in Tel Aviv is designed to test the ability to fly dozens of drones simultaneously in the same airspace, to test the ability to monitor them, prevent collisions and accidents, formulate future regulation for the field and allow shipping companies to test equipment and actual operating costs, using intensive life testing. The battery and skimmer blades, the most consumable parts of the skimmers.
Ayalon Routes, the Innovation Authority, the Civil Aviation Authority and the Director of Smart Transportation at the Ministry of Transportation are partners in the project. The glider flights are managed by the control center of Ayalon Highways in Haifa, with the goal of reaching a situation where one operator controls 10 drones, which make 100 sorties a day.
After deliveries of medicines, medical equipment and fast food, an experiment was carried out in recent weeks by one of the delivery companies in transporting food from a branch of the Osher chain to Hadera, to an ultra-Orthodox educational institution in the area. A team from the Rami Levy network was also present at the event.
"One of our goals is to help companies reduce shipping costs, so that they are available in as many areas as possible and can take as many delivery vehicles off the road as possible," explains Sagi Dagan, VP of Growth and Policy at the Innovation Authority. The use is for tools weighing 25 kg, which can carry a load of 3-4 kg, which can already suffice for small purchases in the supermarket, but not yet for weekly family shopping. "
There are already 250 kg drones on the market that can carry loads of tens of kg, but their operation will require regulatory changes. "One of the things we will need to look at regarding deliveries from food chains is whether the drones will be able to reach the balcony of each apartment, or land in neighborhood delivery centers where they will drop off shopping," says Dagan.
In the last experiments in Hadera, a drone equipped with a fixed wing, a vessel that on the one hand takes off and lands vertically, and on the other hand is capable of flying for distances of tens of kilometers, also participated for the first time. Such a tool could lead to shipments of drugs and tests, for which special taxis are currently sent for hundreds of shekels, but its flight requires the development of an air control capability for an autonomous vehicle that needs to "talk" to the air control while flying between urban operating bubbles of unmanned shipments. This capability is also expected to be tested on flights taking off from Tel Aviv.