Oakland University Professor Jon Carroll went to Africa last summer to explore how drones can help in the fight against Malaria. He is using unmanned aircraft and software used for precision agriculture to support public health, environmental protection, food security, and other efforts.
Fox News has a nice article today, explaining how drones are increasingly used to save people’s lives in Africa. In many ways, Africa has been at the forefront of developing new drone applications, mostly because the rules and regulations that apply to unmanned aircraft are less strict than the are in for instance the US, Canada or Europe. Zipline has been one of the companies that has shown how drones can have a massive positive impact on people’s lives in Africa by currently having flown over 16,000 medical deliveries by drone since the company began in Rwanda in 2016.
Today, Zipline the San Francisco based drone manufacturer and the logistical services company, launched a program in Ghana to deliver medical supplies by drone. In partnership with the government of the West African country, Zipline will fly 30 drones from four distribution centers to deliver medical supplies, such as vaccines, blood, and medication to 2,000 healthcare facilities across the country on a daily basis. Zipline also confirmed that it is looking to expand their services to other countries and to take their delivery service by drone from testing-phase to live-deliveries in the U.S., sometime this summer.
They have been at it for a few years now but earlier this month, DHL, GIZ on behalf of BMZ and Wingcopter, flew the DHL Parcelcopter 4.0 over 37 miles in about 40 minutes to a remote island in Lake Victoria as part of the project ‘Deliver Future’. The tilt-rotor drone can perform vertical take-offs and landings. However, once in the air it can transition to a more energy-efficient fixed-wing done that flies a lot faster.
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Morris Mbetsa, a mostly self-taught inventor and electrical engineer, has built the first passenger drone in Africa. Inspired by companies like Uber and Volocopter, Morris set out to create this prototype to show the world that the people in Africa have the brain power to develop passenger drones, and ultimately to be the first nation in the world with flying taxis
Right outside of Agadez, Niger, in the scrublands of the Sahara, the U.S. airforce is building a massive 2,200-acre drone base, costing $110 million and making it the largest troop largest troop labor construction project in U.S. history, according to the Associated Press. The base should be completed in the next couple of month but as you can imagine, building an airfield in the desert tends to be very complicated. The project already is over $22 million budget and delayed by one year. The new drone base will be used to target extremists deep into West and North Africa, regions that are currently hard to reach with drones.
Oakland University professor Jon Carroll, Ph.D., is bringing agricultural drone technology, that is widely used in the US to Africa. The anthropology professor traveled to Liwonde, Malawi to help farmers optimize their crop production by using drone technology and to promote sustainable agriculture in Africa.
A drone revolution is happening in Africa. This may come as a surprise to most but Africa is leading the way in drone innovation. The lax regulation in most African countries means that new drone ideas and applications can be tried and tested quickly. Aljazeera investigated and looked at some of the most innovative drone concepts.