Meet the high-flying Aussies transforming medical supply delivery

An innovative solution 

At a 2017 networking event, Eric and Swoop Aero co-founder Josh Tepper were asked if drones could deliver chemotherapy medication to rural Australia. The tough question got them thinking.

“With our backgrounds in aviation and robotics, we knew it was technically possible to use a drone to move a kilo of medication 100 kilometres and fly back,” Eric says. “But we started talking about what a scalable system that could do that every day would look like.”

The answer was to build a new end-to-end logistics system from scratch. That August, Eric and Josh formed Swoop Aero.

The company took off in 2018 when the Vanuatu Government and UNICEF awarded it the world’s first competitive tender for medical drone delivery to supply aid to remote islands in Vanuatu.

An extraordinary ecosystem  

Eric says the Swoop Aero system is unique. “We maintain a digital twin of the entire operation that’s like a shadow of the aircraft,” he says. “With the data from the on-board computers and sensors, we can identify how well systems are working.”

He says Swoop Aero acts as its own ecosystem – every piece of hardware and software is constantly feeding information back and forth in real time. This gives the Swoop team up-to-date oversight of key data including battery power, delivery times, airworthiness and fleet efficiency.

Machine learning algorithms dissect this data and produce insights so the team can predict problems, analyse performance and ensure drones remain ready for delivery.

“People had tried to turn remote-controlled drones into delivery drones,” Eric says. “But there was a general lack of aviation knowledge, and they were trying to use of off-the-shelf, commercialised and standardised technology to create a general solution. Applying traditional drone systems as solutions to delivery challenges meant their tech was failing.

“By building a new integrated system we made it cheaper, more reliable and more sustainable.”

Flying towards net zero

Sustainability is a priority for Swoop Aero. The company’s Port Melbourne headquarters is powered by green energy, which keeps the company carbon neutral at the manufacturing level.

Drone bodies are 3D printed, with unused printing material returned to suppliers and recycled into more usable material. Most drone components are also recycled when the aircraft are decommissioned. And Swoop Aero makes rechargeable torches using degraded drone batteries, distributing them to those in remote areas overseas.

The aircrafts are electrically powered, and where possible Swoop uses solar power to recharge. But Eric says even traditional charging still causes little environmental stress.

“Even if you used a normal power point from a coal-fired power station to recharge an aircraft, the energy used to fly 100km, make a drop and fly back would emit less carbon overall than a person riding a bike that same distance.”

Good for people, good for the planet 

And all Swoop’s operations in Africa and Vanuatu are completely off-grid, making them effectively carbon neutral.

In the fight to get carbon emissions net zero around the world, Eric says transport is an area to target.

“There is a lot of carbon emission in rural areas,” he says. “If we can take vehicles off the road by not making people drive hundreds of kilometres for supplies, that’s huge. The same goes for cities – taking cars off the road removes emissions from those vehicles and reduces traffic so the whole network is more efficient.”