DroneUp and Elsight Halo: Connectivity for Large Scale Drone Delivery

Reliable Connectivity for Large-Scale Drone Delivery Services: DroneUp and Elsight Halo

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DroneUp’s major drone delivery program is one of the most widely recognized in the United States.  Expanding to six states, DroneUp’s “Drone Hubs” will serve millions of households: delivering retail goods, on demand.

Developing and future-proofing drone hubs means creating an ecosystem that can support a wide variety of use cases.   “While it would be possible to create a drone delivery solution that operated completely autonomously without intervention from a human pilot, DroneUp felt it was important to design in a remote piloting capability,” says the Elsight case study. “Such a capability would provide safety and redundancy for delivery drones, and could also be essential for other use cases that DroneUp pursued in the future. Robust communications would be critical for supporting command and control, as well as for other capabilities such as sensor and video feeds.”

The “Six Nines” of Availability

To meet the expectations of both customers and aviation authorities for drone delivery and flight beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) DroneUp must get as close as possible to the “six nines” of availability: 99.9999% uptime.

Traditional RF links are too limited in range, and SATCOM (satellite communications) solutions proved to be too expensive. This left cellular as the communications technology of choice. DroneUp looked at a variety of different cellular connectivity products on the market, and found that many were either single-SIM or single-carrier solutions. While the drone delivery use case would not need the bandwidth of more than a single SIM, the ability to utilize multiple SIMs across multiple carriers eliminated the potential problem of having a single point of failure, providing the reliability that was required.

Elsight’s Halo was a great fit.  “The carrier-agnostic Halo can utilise up to four SIMs from multiple carriers, and uses AI-powered bonding that aggregates all available bandwidth into one, automatically balances traffic, and allows drone communication systems to seamlessly switch to a backup link if network coverage is lost.”

“Elsight provided the reliability that we needed, provided the connection consistency, provided the bandwidth. Elsight had the cloud, provisioning, management and software capabilities that allowed us to continue refining and improving, something Elsight still does very well,” said DroneUp CTO John Vernon.

DroneUp needed to prove the safety, reliability, and viability of wide scale drone delivery as quickly as possible.  Halo’s solution – easy to integrate, with an extremely low SWaP (size, weight and power) footprint – makes it ideal for company’s who need a partner that can help them to develop new business use cases and ecosystems.

“Creating new business opportunities and helping to develop and expand the BVLOs industry is something we take deep pride in. DroneUp’s drone delivery is an ideal use case of what can be done with the Elsight Halo and our proprietary 6th sense connectivity solution. We are thrilled to be working with John and the entire team at DroneUp, in a promising partnership that will help grow the drone industry, together,” said Yoav Amitai, Elsight CEO.

Download the complete case study here.

Read more about DroneUp and Elsight Halo:

• Tomorrow, DroneUp Will Showcase Drone Services from Walmart Hubs
• The DroneUp Drone Delivery Model: Why Second Mover Advantage Has Put Them Out in Front
• DroneUp Launches Multi-Site Walmart Drone Delivery Service in Arkansas
• Spright Chooses Elsight Halo to Ensure Connectivity for Critical Missions
• Auterion Integrates Elsight Halo with Skynode for Multi-Network Broadband Connectivity