So on tuesday it was reported that UPS were in talks to partner with autonomous delivery drone startup Matternet to experiment with using drones to deliver medical supplies.
The drones are gonna be used in transporting supplies using Matternet’s M2 quadcopters to WakeMed hospital in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Describing how the operations would work the company said “Throughout the WakeMed program, a medical professional will load a secure drone container with a medical sample or specimen – such as a blood sample – at one of WakeMed’s nearby facilities. The drone will fly along a predetermined flight path, monitored by a specially trained Remote Pilot-in-Command (RPIC), to a fixed landing pad at WakeMed’s main hospital and central pathology lab. This will be an ongoing program at WakeMed, and UPS and Matternet will use the learnings to consider how drones can be applied to improve transport services at other hospitals and medical facilities across the U.S.
UPS has been showing interest in in using drones to deliver health care products. The delivery giant partnered with vaccine nonprofit GAVI and Zipline in 2016 to deliver blood samples to remote locations in Rwanda. 👍❤ in switzerland alone, the drone firm has completed more than 3,000 flights for health care systems.
Tech analysts and CEOs have began giving predictions and speculations that very soon the skies would be fiiled with package bearing drones overcrowding the skies.
Regulators continue to debate allowing companies like Matternet to operate drones beyond a pilot’s visual line of sight, at night, and over heavily populated areas.
