Transporting medical goods efficiently with automatic flight systems

As part of the innovation initiative mFUND, The Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport is sponsoring the European UAV-Supported Transport Solutions for Medical Goods project, which is known in German as EULE for short.

In the Rhenish mining area and the Meuse-Rhine Euroregion, unmanned automatic drones will be able to transport medication, blood samples and tissue samples safely and efficiently between retailers, hospitals and laboratories in the future. Professor Dieter Moormann heads up the Institute for Flight System Dynamics at RWTH Aachen University, and it is this institute that is managing the project.

EULE will turn the results of the EU project “SAFIR med-13” from being a one-off demonstration into something that can take place regularly. The focuses of this project are on aspects relating to 5G networked data management, data protection, and the improvement and integration of new data sources, writes RWTH Aachen University in a press release.

One of the specialty areas of the RWTH Institute’s research is integrating automatic flight systems into airspace. This helps to avoid them crashing into manned aircraft like emergency services helicopters. The drone must independently detect such obstacles and plan its flight trajectory to avoid them. The drone will not fly over critical areas, such as densely populated inner cities or nature reserves. The University Institute is also involved in the development of the system architecture and in the development of the interface between the flight system and the groundside platform. It is also developing a control center to centrally manage and monitor the flight systems.

flyXdrive GmbH, Docs in Clouds TeleCare GmbH, the City of Aachen, Droniq GmbH, the International University of Applied Sciences Aachen, Uniklinik RWTH Aachen, and Vodafone GmbH are all involved in the EULE research project. Together with the Institute for Flight System Dynamics, they want to establish the Rhenish mining area as a key business and scientific area for drone technology.

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