Airbus Cargo Drone Challenge

[Reaper]

Airbus started together with Localmotors a cargo drone design challenge. The challenge is to design a VTOL drone based on the Airbus Quadcruiser design.

https://localmotors.com/localmotors/airbus-cargo-drone-challenge/entries/

 

[hesham]

Nice find Reaper

 

[CiTrus90]

Thanks for sharing Reaper.

Yesterday I entered the contest just for the fun of it, not being an engineer or anything else. I named my concept MEMET. It would be nice if I could get a free trip to the Farnborough Airshow, but in all honesty I think this kind of challenges are way out of my league. Well...in Italy we use to say "l'importante è partecipare", which roughly means "it's taking part that matters, not winning"...

Kind regards.

 

[ouroboros]

The intellectual property transfer requirements relative to the prize rewards was not very good in my opinion. If you can make a viable quadplane that can win, the idea was worth more on your own.

 

[Dragon029]

The intellectual property transfer requirements relative to the prize rewards was not very good in my opinion. If you can make a viable quadplane that can win, the idea was worth more on your own.

That's assuming you have the capital, knowledge, skills and drive to bring it to market, which most of the contestants don't appear to have. Those that do and launch start-ups tend to never make it to market, or die soon after.

The UAS market is a bit of an immature and flooded niche at the moment; there's a lot of interesting and varied designs out there, but simply not enough demand. Part of that I'd argue is due to the immature regulations and infrastructure, but another is certainly the software and energy density not quite being there for some of the more exciting, but difficult jobs that require manning for now.

 

[Grey Havoc]

The project is still alive it would seem:

http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/airbus-test-flying-car/

The Airbus Skyways project envisions huge fleets of parcel delivery drones. Airbus isn’t going into the package delivery business but sees retailers like Amazon and delivery services like DHL as potential Skyways customers.