Cargo Delivery Drone

Overview

The cargo delivery drone is an autonomous hexacopter built to carry a parcel from a depot to a delivery point and lower it to the ground without landing. Six rotors on foldable arms lift a loaded weight of up to 25 kg, and the Carbon Airframe folds flat for transport and storage. Most of the aircraft's mass sits in the central body: the avionics, the swappable Smart Battery Pack, and the Cargo System that holds and releases the package.

Each arm carries one Propulsion Unit unit, a heavy-lift brushless motor paired with an electronic speed controller and a large folding propeller. The aircraft navigates with RTK GNSS for centimeter-grade positioning, watches for obstacles with a forward radar and downward lidar in its Sensor Suite, and runs autonomous routing on an on-board AI board. A ballistic parachute provides a safe descent if a motor or the power system fails in flight.

How it works

The Flight Controller is the heart of the aircraft. Triple-redundant inertial sensors and dual barometers tell it the drone's attitude and altitude, the RTK module fixes its position to a few centimeters, and the autopilot mixes those into six motor commands sent to the ESCs many times per second. To climb, hover, or move, it raises or lowers thrust on individual rotors so the whole airframe tilts and translates.

Higher-level decisions run on the Companion Computer, an AI board that fuses the radar, lidar, and downward camera streams to plan a route, avoid obstacles, and confirm the landing zone is clear before delivery. The depot loads a package into the parcel box, the operator sends a destination, and the drone flies the route autonomously while reporting position and health over the Datalink Radio radio.

On arrival it descends to a hover, and the winch in the cargo system spools out a tether to lower the parcel to the ground. Once the package touches down the servo hook opens to release it, the winch retracts the line, and the drone climbs back out and returns to base. The Power Distribution Board feeds pack power to the six ESCs, the avionics, and the cargo actuators throughout the flight, and the battery's management board protects the cells and reports remaining charge so the autopilot always keeps enough reserve to make it home or trigger the parachute.