Drone Delivery Canada Makes Progress on Canary Testing
January 25, 2022
Toronto-based Drone Delivery Canada Corp. (DDC) has announced continued success in its development and testing of its Canary drone system, which it expects will be used as a logistics software platform for software-as-a-service customers in business and government.
The company said testing and development is on schedule, with the completion of aircraft tuning at altitude (pitch, yaw, and roll), and completion of aircraft ground and vibration testing. The company said current testing includes flight controller tuning to fly in semi-autonomous flight modes, refining onboard avionics, payload and communications systems. The next steps will be testing full autonomous missions and expanding the flight envelope.
While the company said the flight range and cargo capacity of the Canary will be confirmed via future testing, it is expected to have a range of about 20 km, with a cargo capacity around 4 kg. Features currently include a new motor configuration, next-generation smart battery technology, a touchless cargo drop feature, and a future optional public announcement system and optional aircraft parachute. The company said the new features can potentially unlock additional customer use cases, facilitating future flights over people that could open markets in urban and residential areas for business-to-business and business-to-consumer residential deliveries.
“We’re pleased to see continued successful Canary testing on target and to be working towards its commercialization,” said Michael Zahra, president and CEO of DDC. “Its new functionality, especially the aircraft parachute, unlocks potential future use cases that are currently challenging to address due to regulations – like flight over people, plus urban and residential deliveries at scale. Being able to address these applications with our award-winning solution is on our strategic roadmap and is expected to open up potentially significant and currently underserved markets.”
The company said its Sparrow hardware continues to operate commercially, and will continue to be available to future customers. It said it looks to complete the Robin XL commercialization as future market demands indicate, and the long-range, heavy-lift Condor is DDC’s latest drone, fully integrated with its FLYTE software system.
As part of its ecosystem, DDC said it is working on development of ground-based and airborne detect-and-avoid (DAA) systems, intended to open even more commercially viable use cases, BVLOS operations, and to reduce operational costs for customers.
For more details on the company and its offerings, visit the Drone Delivery Canada website here.
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