Five Kilometer BVLOS Route Links Swiss Hospitals

Mountain View, California’s Matternet is a developer of commercial drone delivery systems for urban and suburban environments. By dint of its M2 drone and Matternet Software platform, the company serves consumers directly or in partnership with logistics organizations the likes of United Parcel Service (UPS). In 2017, Matternet became the world’s first company to be authorized to perform commercial Beyond Visual Line Of Sight (BVLOS) drone operations over cities in Switzerland. In 2019, the company partnered with UPS to launch drone delivery services in the U.S. and, together, started the first revenue drone delivery operations in the U.S. In 2022, Matternet M2 became the first drone delivery system to achieve standard Type Certification by the Federal Aviation Administration.

On 12 December 2022 Matternet announced it had commenced test operations along a five-kilometer BVLOS route over the west-central Swiss city of Zurich. Subject route, the longest of its type, will be used to transport diagnostic samples between Zurich’s Triemli and Waid Hospitals—both part of Stadspital Zürich, a municipal hospital owned by the city of Zurich.

Matternet founder and CEO Andreas Raptopoulos remarked: “Launching this new service for Stadspital Zürich is an important moment for Matternet, but also for the future of both health-care and logistics services. Leveraging the longest urban BVLOS route to transport biological samples for diagnostic testing on-demand changes the way that hospitals and hospital systems can approach patient care, all while creating new efficiencies that can improve patient experiences and ensure that they keep pace with the demands of the 21st century.”

The test—which utilizes Matternet’s drones and transports biological unmentionables between the two hospitals’ laboratories in just seven-minutes—demonstrates the potential of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) to provide fast, on-demand delivery of individual urgent shipments. What’s more Matternet’s drones autonomously (with remote supervision via the company’s mission control center in Zurich) transport medical cargos with secure end-to-end chain of custody without congesting Zurich’s roadways or emitting CO2.

Currently, hospitals rely on road vehicles to deliver samples to laboratories for testing. The approach is predicated upon laboratories and their personnel being periodically inundated by car and van loads of modern medicine’s effluvia. For urgent, single-patient diagnostic tests, hospitals rely on road-going couriers—which are often slower and less efficient than conventional bulk deliveries..

Cognizant of the difficulties with which hospitals and their centralized (or affiliate) laboratories are faced, Matternet is actively working on drone delivery networks capable of fulfilling modern healthcare systems’ urgent logistical needs—such as the BVLOS route currently being vetted in Switzerland.

“Switzerland has established itself as one of the most advanced countries in the world for scaled drone delivery operations,” Mr. Raptopoulos added. “And this new route in Zurich—built on the foundation of five-years of successful operations in Switzerland—will help us create insights into developing a city-wide medical network that can become a template for similar networks in Europe, the U.S., and beyond.”

FMI: www.mttr.net