In 2019, Uber Eats completed their first successful food delivery using a drone. They partnered with ModalAI to use VOXL, their lightweight computing platform with 4G connectivity. VOXL helped to keep the drone on a safe flight path even out of pilot’s LoS
Cell Connectivity is a reliable technology for BVLOS drone flights (Beyond Visual Line Of Sight)
VOXL
- Computing and communications platform that creates integrated machine-vision based autonomous navigation maps for indoor and outdoor robots
- Does not require GPS to run
- Uses SLAM for mapping
- Uses Snapdragon CPUs
- Supports 4 cameras using the MIPI interface
Method of Operation
flowchart LR
A["Uber Elevate Cloud Services"] --- B["VOXL"]
B["VOXL"] --- C["Delivery Drone"]
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Uber Elevate Cloud Services - Airspace management system for tracking and guiding drones
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VOXL - Command and Control of the drone + Autonomous navigation + Air traffic monitoring using Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B)
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https://www.therobotreport.com/voxl-modalai-helps-uber-eats-test-drone-delivery-food/