TORONTO — Drone Delivery Canada (DDC) announced today it has signed a three-year collaboration agreement with Bell Mobility Inc. to develop products and services and improve technology as it relates to 5G and multi-access edge computing (MEC) for autonomous drone performance.
This follows Bell’s launch yesterday of public MEC, powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) Wavelength, for its business customers.
“The collaboration is expected to lead to new solutions that will be revenue generating for DDC and will focus on the development of technologies that will evaluate, in a controlled environment, new capabilities to support Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS), Command and Control (C2), Remote Identification (Remote ID), and Unmanned Aerial System Traffic Management (UTM), based on 5G and Multi-access Edge Compute (MEC),” reads DDC’s press release.
The agreement is part of DDC’s strategic initiative “to drive further enhancements to its proprietary drone delivery platform and its Flyte software solution,” the release explains.
DDC’s intention is that “any technical advancements that result from the collaboration with Bell will be adopted by DDC across its full fleet of delivery drones, including the Condor heavy lift drone, which is currently undergoing development and commercial testing,” the release says.
“We are pleased to be collaborating with Bell to work on unique customer drone delivery projects, and also to further advance our solution to leverage the advanced technologies and know-how that Bell brings,” said Steve Magirias, CEO of Drone Delivery Canada, in the release.
“Technological advancements like Bell 5G, multi-access edge computing, GPS-independent location tracking, computational offloading, IoT and smart grids will position DDC for the next generation of advanced and novel drone applications in logistics, as well as mobile real-time imaging & sensor data analytics.
“Our focus on a very broad range of drone applications fits perfectly with the wide-ranging capabilities of Bell. Market response to our logistics solution continues to be very favourable and we are pleased with our ongoing commercial progress and technology momentum,” Magirias said.
“Bell is excited to collaborate with Drone Delivery Canada to explore new capabilities that will leverage the speed, low latency and coverage of Bell’s 5G network, our IoT connectivity and breadth of solutions to enable autonomous drone delivery and related services,” said Charlie Wade, vice-president of products and services at Bell Mobility.
“We’re committed to fostering the growth of companies like DDC and next-generation technologies to support Canada’s growth and industry in the years to come and look forward to collaborating further with DDC.”
