Startup Uses Model-Based Design to Develop Unmanned Delivery Drones - MATLAB & Simulink
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Startup Uses Model-Based Design to Develop Unmanned Delivery Drones

Arpit Sharma and Rahul Jayaprakash, RangeAero

RangeAero is a startup company working to build an ecosystem of unmanned aircrafts for short-haul deliveries in India. The team used a Model-Based Design approach to help prototype their coaxial helicopter that can precisely deliver materials in crowded, urban areas. Relying on MATLAB® and Simulink®, RangeAero has built and tested a series of prototypes for the aircraft to demonstrate their concepts and attain the confidence of investors.

As part of the MathWorks Startup Program, RangeAero has access to MATLAB at a startup-friendly price and engineering support from MathWorks experts. The partnership and tools in MATLAB enable them to save resources, work efficiently to build out and validate their technology, raise more capital, and grow their team.

Published: 2 Apr 2023

We are RangeAero. We are modifying helicopters in a fashion that they can be utilized for logistics. 63% of the logistics goods are on demand and 45% of them are time sensitive. So there is definitely a need of shipping goods faster.

Right now, there is nobody who is doing what we're doing because currently for a company that wants to send goods in a medium region, like for instance, between two cities or a few hundred kilometers, they only have two options, railway and trucks, of which railways run on their schedule, and they don't go everywhere. Trucks are better in this sense but traffic in the city I live in, in Bangalore, traffic is a huge issue.

The trucks get stuck in into the traffic congestion. Bypass all the congestion, and deliver the goods faster than any time available until today.

RangeAero will provide the tools or the vehicles that make the cargo delivery in the medium scale more efficient, faster. Make it more reliable as well.

For why we selected helicopters, it can land anywhere. It can take off from anywhere. It can carry transport for 10 kilometers, 20 kilometers, or maybe 100 kilometers in one mission.

We are going for a fully autonomous system. We should be capable of taking off, landing, or fully flying on its own.

Being a product-based design company, you cannot directly jump into the bigger product because of the cost involved and the effort involved. MathWorks can provide us a model-based approach, where a certain amount of testing can be done in the software, and based on the performance from the smaller-scale simulation, you can further go in and increase and start building that bigger-scale prototype.

For a startup, it is important because it will save you a lot of time. It will save you a lot of costs. It will also save you a lot of effort, and end of the day, it will make you safer. Your hardware can crash if it is not safe. Without even putting lives at risk, without putting hardware at risk, you can develop and test the approach that you are taking further.

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