At the last Innovabiomed fair in Verona on 24 and 25 May, Veneto motorway concessions, Sky 53 presented an innovative project that uses drones to cope with health emergencies and transport them quickly medications, blood bags and medical supplies. An idea that other companies also work on: Leonardo, Telespazio and D-Flight, for example, last year they organized two experimental flights of a fixed-wing vehicle with vertical take-off and landing between the Santa Marinella and Palidoro offices of the Bambino Gesù pediatric hospital in Rome, 32 kilometers away. Another project, baptized “Philotea“and developed by a group of companies led by the Neapolitan Carpitech, is based instead on the use of a multirotor drone with the” Smox “capsule, a self-contained sanitary container for the transport of drugs, biological materials, blood and organs. the Tuscan startup ABzeroa spin-off of the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa, and the Roman Eurolink Systems with its Beluga quadcopter equipped with a cargo-bay for the transport of bags of blood, plasma and drugs in areas that are difficult to reach quickly or in emergency situations .
Mobility
From F1 to the Venetian motorways: drones controlled from km away
by Vincenzo Borgomeo
21 March 2022
What are they doing
The fleet of drones developed by the Italian Calvi Technologies and from the Israeli Gadfin it would serve a strategic motorway junction, where there are health centers of excellence such as the hospitals of Mestre, Padua and Treviso that could benefit from these air connections. And above all to exploit theCav technological infrastructure, a company set up by Anas and the Veneto Region, which aims to use drones to monitor traffic and the progress of work in the context of the Skytraffic program. Managed by an operations center, the small and very fast vehicles will be able to push themselves up to a hundred kilometers. For now, the project is at an advanced stage of testing, with hundreds of flight hours in controlled areas, as regards medical drones while the monitoring ones have already entered experimental service. “Security – he explains Saturday Fuscotechnical director of Cav – is one of the fundamental requirements of the project, both as regards the flight control system and the drones themselves: the latter are equipped with a redundant control system, anti-collision laser system, emergency system in case of electromagnetic interference and parachute “.
Atid’s mediation work
Behind the landing of Gadfin’s drone, and of many other initiatives of the Israeli scientific and technological world in Italy, there is the Atid (Advanced Technology Innovation Distribution, but in Hebrew the acronym means “future” not surprisingly) founded and led by Elio Tesciuba. A group that acts as a bridge between Israel and Italy, to mediate and facilitate scientific, technological and commercial relations between the two countries. “We have specialized for twenty years in making bridges between Italy and Israel – says Tesciuba a Italian Tech – we only deal with biomedical. We take Israeli technologies, take them to Italian research centers and do clinical research. We are talking about exoskeletons, systems for neurological diseases and even radiotherapy developed by the University of Tel Aviv “.
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Specifically, Gadfin’s drone “has very particular characteristics: it is obviously not a military drone, it weighs 25 kilos, has three hours of autonomy, then goes up to 250 kilometers per hour depending on the winds and, I repeat, it is designed for healthcaretherefore for the transport of materials, blood and organs from one hospital to another “adds Tesciuba. The team that developed it is of the highest level, with people from the aeronautics. Compared to the Italian consortium, Cav has made available the spaces and infrastructures and Calvi, which has always made drones and therefore has a long authorization experience, will take care of the management, a truly non-trivial matter. They are drones in the service of the public“.
Regarding the launch times, Tesciuba wants to run even if a lot of permits are needed: “The idea is to carry out a pilot project for six months, we hope that by June all the authorizations to use a drone are in place – concludes the entrepreneur and innovation expert. – We would then like to decide the real logistical needs of the hospitals in the area based on a study. In any case, in Veneto I found an incredible ecosystem ready to welcome us “.
Flying for health
As we saw at the Rome Drone Conference last November, there are many projects of this kind and in general at an international level, as we explained, that of use in the health sector is one of the most promising fronts for drones, far more than commercial deliveries. The Aerospace Technological District of Brindisione of the most interesting poles in Italy in this sense, as part of the European project “Corus-Xuam” will experiment for example the urgent transport of vaccines with drones between the airport of Grottaglie and the hospital of Manduria (Taranto), while the Dot Foundation (Organ Donation and Transplantation) and the Polytechnic of Turin are working on the “Indoor” project for the transport of biological material and organs by drones.
“As with mobility, healthcare is also undergoing an epochal technological transition and in this step it is essential to ensure a fast, efficient and safe transport system in order not to compromise the effectiveness of the service” he explains. Ugo DibennardoCEO of Cav, returning to the Venetian project which stands out for the particularity of the vehicle.