Vaughan drone company says ‘nobody’ has its patented system ‘globally’

DDC is fast-tracking the commercialization of its Condor drone

Yorkregion.com
June 1, 2020

As aspiring inventors around the world race to have their signature drones swarm international skies, Vaughan is the launch pad for a drone company that’s making “history.”

Drone Delivery Canada --a public company since 2016 --scored its second US patent in late April to simplify the routing and control of delivery drones, especially in crowded urban areas.

Its dream is the full commercialization of its “disruptive” and “pioneering” technology.

“There is nobody else who has a system like this globally,” DDC’s president and CEO, Michael Zahra, said with gleaming confidence after displaying the company’s automated depots used for its drones, making what he calls an “ecosystem of products we sell” to other businesses.

These depots can be thought of as mini-airports for the drones, as they provide information on whether the battery is fully charged to fly from depot A to depot B, for example. “We know all the information that’s going on in the drone, the environment around it,” Zahra said, describing how each detail of the system is patented: “everything, including the mythology of how we fly.”

But DDC doesn’t only sell its depot-backed drones to clients who need to transport cargo to some remote area for the time being. It also has its Operation Control Centre (OCC) room, which looks like a trendy and vastly spacious movie theatre with a gigantic screen displaying drone and aircraft traffic.

From its OCC room, “we monitor all of our projects globally,” Zahra explained, adding that the system runs automatically and is unmanned.

In the room, there are operators needed to “monitor what’s going on with these projects” while keeping an eye on aircraft as well.  

“If there is any issue in the airport --let’s say another aircraft having an emergency and (wanting) everybody cleared out of the way --we can take control remotely of our drones and we can do whatever we need to do to deconflict the situation,” he said.

The operator, who can monitor up to 50 drones simultaneously, can then decide to either “continue, land or change (direction), left or right.”

DDC is also readying itself, as it expects the industry “is going to explode,” even before the COVID-19 pandemic, to “limit person-to-person contact and bring needed medical and pharmaceutical supplies to (Indigenous), remote, rural and suburban communities.”

Citing how its drones can keep their cargo temperature-controlled, the drones can “transport blood samples to laboratories for testing and deliver other relevant supplies needed for Canada to effectively manage the current situation,” Zahra elaborated.

So far, DDC has three flagship drones: the Sparrow, the Robin and the Condor.

The smallest is the Sparrow, which can travel up to 30 kilometres with a 4.5-kilogram payload. Next is the Robin, with a range of 60 kilometres and a 11.5-kilogram payload, and lastly the Condor, which has a whopping range of 200 kilometres, a 120 km/h speed and a 180-kilogram payload; it needs further testing.

“So as a company, we're certified to fly, for instance, like an airline. And then each individual drone needs to be certified by the government for it to fly. The Sparrow has been done. The Robin will be done at our own test range (in Vaughan).”

Zahra expects the Sparrow to be commercially available this summer, while the Condor will be available by the end of this year.

However, in response to COVID-19, DDC is fast-tracking its Condor drone certification and testing in Alberta as a result of market demand.

Before Ontario declared a state of emergency due to COVID-19 on March 17, the company was inching closer to reaching its complete circle.

“We're implementing our first customers, and we're going to see our first revenue soon,” Zahra said.

“We've been building up to this and developing the technology and commercializing the business and going operational for the last five or six years,” he added. “Now the industry is about to take off.”

With the U.S.-based Quantum Air announcing its launch of the world's first air taxi service, Zahra said that drone technology is no longer “futuristic.”

“That's pretty much an emerging technology ... It's happening now,” he said, heralding an expedited leap in more advanced transportation, especially for a country as big as Canada.