// 06 Drone Spl With A Drone Acharya

What do you call someone who is so knowledgeable and so passionate about the industry she works for? I felt, that such a person is an "Acharya ". Taking time out of her busy schedule, Ayushi Mishra , Co-Founder and COO of DronaMaps , my guest editor for the day, shares her in-depth responses to an assortment of questions that one was always looking for when it came to knowing more about Drones and was struggling to find them by merely googling.

What you take from this special Bit Talkies edition, is abundant knowledge about Drones and a host of reading links for the weekend. Enough to equip you with the ammunition that can help you conceive your Drone idea.

The answer to that question depends heavily on the use case and the type of drones, however, for most use cases: nano drones can fly up to 15m, micro up to 60m, and other drones up to 120m. This is not a technical limitation, it's a regulatory one, which means drones have been built to fly higher to capture images of relevance with better cameras or even lower and closer to people with stealth modes. The 400-feet rule is that most operated/manned aircraft activity usually starts at 500 feet. While aeroplanes and helicopters start off much closer to the ground during takeoff, that shouldn’t pose a problem for drone operators because drones aren’t allowed to fly near airports anyway. However, drones intended for a defence use case are a different ball game. The Defence Ministry has issued a request for information (RFI) for the purchase of surveillance quadcopters which can be deployed above as well as below 4,000 meters above mean sea levels.

Most trials till recent years were focused on the safety of flight in an autonomous vehicle and not the impact of flight on medicines. However, lately, the question has become more nuanced as to how a drone flight affect medicines in comparison to transit by road. A paper by researchers from the University of Southampton and King’s College concluded based on three trials in which insulin ampoules and mock blood stocks were transported to the site and flown using industry-standard packaging by a fixed-wing or a multi-copter drone. The in-flight vibration levels in both the drone types exceeded road-induced levels by up to a factor of three, and predominant vibration occurred at significantly higher frequencies. Nonetheless, the flown samples gave clear insulin solutions that met the British Pharmacopoeia specification, and no aggregation of insulin was detected.

Drones in the sky for different use cases bring up the question of what the skies would look like in a decade. With drones buzzing around for surveillance, photography, mapping, and deliveries, similar to a Traffic Management System framework deployed for aircraft, there needs to be one in place for drones as well. The goal is to create a system that can integrate drones safely and efficiently into air traffic that is already flying in low-altitude airspace. That way, package delivery and fun flights won’t interfere with helicopters, aeroplanes, nearby airports or even safety drones being flown by first responders helping to save lives.

This policy framework defines the architecture and mechanism for traffic management of unmanned aircraft in Very Low Level (VLL) airspace up to 1000 feet above ground level. This airspace shall be defined as UTM Airspace. Further, this framework establishes the roles and responsibilities of key stakeholders who are a part of the UTM ecosystem in India. UTM systems are envisioned to enable safe and complex operations in the UTM Airspace. They shall assist in achieving the following objectives:

Objective 1: Allow identified stakeholders to seamlessly communicate with each other. Objective 2: Assist in separating unmanned aircraft from other manned and unmanned aircraft. Objective 3: Provide situational awareness of VLL airspace to concerned stakeholders.

In healthcare, it's helpful to think of drones for logistics as a substitute for what a helicopter or car/truck can do. Therefore, most experiments and live operations have been focused on the logistics of moving medicines in hard-to-reach areas, Zipline is an example of this with a hub and spoke model in Rwanda. The second stage was the progression to biological materials like blood and path samples. There are companies creating passenger-grade autonomous vehicles for flights for patients and emergency responders that can carry the weight of individuals as well, for example, EHang. The company has also launched a drone taxi initiative in Dubai.

As of right now, you would need to align with all the regulatory requirements that are applied on a payload drone flight by the DGCA, which means, UIN, pilot license, NPNT compliances to name a few. However, this does not yet cover the fitness of the transported material for use in a hospital, be it medicines, samples, or organs. ICMR recently conducted a test for transporting covid vaccines in the North East and has shared a paper on the same with a Take off checklist mentioned as well, link mentioned in references. Another point of consideration is the medium of transport, as long as the storage remains consistent with land transport, special permissions are not required from healthcare bodies, however, if the drone(carrier compartment within the drone body or the payload carrier is adapted in any shape or form for healthcare-related transport, then it does bring up questions of clearance akin to the FDA.

www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/army-to-buy-drones-to-enhance-high-altitude- surveillance-capabilities/article65385354.ece

www.civilaviation.gov.in

www.dnaindia.com/india/report-independence-day-2021-drone-usage-guidelines-res trictions-and-no-fly-zones-across-india-2903915

www.mdpi.com/2504-446X/5/1/22/htm

www.civilaviation.gov.in/sites/default/files/National-UTM-Policy-Framework-2021_2 4_Oct_2021.pdf

www.ehang.com/news/248.html

wwwspectrum.ieee.org/in-the-air-with-ziplines-medical-delivery-drones

www.icmr.gov.in/idrone.html

www.icmr.gov.in/pdf/idrone/f_Checklist_for_Health_Department_and_Drone_Oper ator_V3.pdf