Use Case: Increasing Delivery Range

Last Mile Delivery (LMD) is the movement of goods from a distribution hub to the final delivery destination. Whether it be home goods, medical supplies, or fast food, everyone is hoping to get their deliveries sooner, which is why drones are often brought into the LMD conversation. 

For safety, noise, and cost purposes, it is vital to keep delivery drones physically small. Unfortunately, this limits battery and payload capacity, which in turn limits a vehicle’s range and the kind of packages it can carry. These are extremely important metrics for drone delivery companies, so any method of increasing flight time and/or payload capacity, while keeping the drone the same size, is of great value.  

We decided to evaluate a standard delivery drone use case. Let’s assume a vehicle is designed to fly a total of 30 km. We’ll also assume it is intended to use ⅓ of its power to fly to the delivery address and drop off the package and another ⅓ to fly back with the goal of keeping ⅓ of its battery in reserve in the event of facing harsh weather conditions. Therefore, the target roundtrip distance is 20 km, the radius around the distribution hub is 10 km, and the total area covered is 314 square km. There are of course many variables that impact the range of a real delivery drone, but hopefully this simple example illustrates the importance of 

With all of that in mind, we then decided to recalculate this scenario with Vertiq motor modules on the vehicle. There are many benefits to the Vertiq tech that would increase the performance of the vehicle, but for this calculation, we only focused on the 10% efficiency gain due to our FEC technology. This gain will allow the vehicle to fly an extra 3 km overall. Assuming the drone manufacturer keeps the reserve value the same, this should allow for the delivery radius to increase by 15% to 11.5 km, which in turn increases the delivery area around the distribution hub by ~32%. That is a lot more customers that a single drone can deliver to!