Bruce McPherson

Blue Bear Systems announces the successful completion and flight demonstration of its Air Druids medical delivery programme. This exciting programme has been enabled by funding through the governments Future Flight programme.

We were lucky enough to be joined for our demonstration by Dave Hodgson – Mayor of Bedford, Patrick Lyons – Acting Manager for Economic Growth & Development and Vicki Murdie – Innovation Lead (Future Flight Challenge) for UK Research and Innovation.

The Air Druids programme built upon Blue Bears existing proven Centurion^TM C2 swarming drone control system, and drone logistics technologies.

The Airdruids programme demonstrated the seamless integration of the medical payload into Blue Bears existing modular open architecture. This provided the ability to have a real time, fully monitored, temperature-controlled payload tightly coupled to the broader command and control system. The payload is monitored for vibration, temperature, and anti tamper/exposure to light.

Linking the payload data directly into the UAS as opposed to having a separate system such as LTE allows for operation where there is no mobile phone coverage with no data black outs. This enables real time tracking for the entire flight path. This is particularly important for disaster relief where phone networks might have gone down, or for simply flying at higher altitudes where there is no mobile coverage.

Blue Bears open architecture, coupled with their SmartConnect^TM technology allows for a fully scalable solution for routine and emergency medical logistics. SmartConnect^TM technology enables multi domain unmanned systems including UAVs, UGVs and USVs to all work together collaboratively and be simultaneously tasked from a single location/operator.

Blue Bear also recently demonstrated the scalability of this same technology and how it can be utilised on swarms of larger logistics drones carrying up 60kg of payload for the Royal Marines.

The flexible system design allows drones from any manufacture to be utilised, as the technology is agnostic to the airframe. Thus, the swarming control system will be able to run a logistics flight control hub, tasking, scheduling and monitoring large numbers of drones in real time.

Ian Williams-Wynn, MD said, we have been working on the swarming drone control and logistics systems for several years, and it is now flight proven with up to 20 different drones. We are currently working on further medical logistics projects with more to come in the near future. We welcome opportunities for collaboration to accelerate the swarming drone logistics market.