Swiss Firm RigiTech Enables Drone Delivery—Without a Landing or Takeoff

The company’s prototype precision dropping system delivered wind turbine parts 20 miles offshore with a 100 percent success rate.

Jack Daleo

Monday, July 03, 2023 at 04:17 PM ET

Verified

Key Takeaways:

RigiTech successfully tested a drone delivery system for spare parts to Ørsted's Anholt Offshore Wind Farm in Denmark, completing 40 deliveries with a 100% success rate.
The key innovation is RigiTech's prototype precision dropping system, which autonomously releases cargo from a few feet in the air, eliminating the need for drones to land on structures without pads.
The entire operation was fully autonomous, remotely monitored beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) from 83 miles away, leveraging AI-based flight planning, precision navigation, and computer vision.
This drone delivery method offers significant efficiency improvements for offshore wind turbine maintenance and showcases RigiTech's advanced capabilities in long-range, autonomous BVLOS operations.

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Wind turbine maintenance is an important yet unheralded task. But drones have arrived to spice things up.

RigiTech is a Swiss drone manufacturer and operator boasting some of the most extensive beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) flight authorizations in the industry. And it just completed a landmark test of its Eiger delivery system, flying spare parts to the Anholt Offshore Wind Farm, located 20 sm (17 nm) off the coast of Denmark. But there’s a catch—the drones didn’t need to land.