Boston-based American Robotics is approved to operate its Scout unmanned aircraft in rural areas and below a certain altitude, achieving a milestone that may allow the industry to ‘truly take off’
Routine drone delivery of clinical laboratory specimens and medical supplies moved a step closer to reality with the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) green light to American Robotics (AR) to operate its fully automated drones without on-site pilots or on-the-ground spotters.
The Massachusetts-based company becomes the first drone operator to receive an FAA Certificate of Waiver, allowing it to operate its unmanned aircraft “beyond the visual line of sight (BVLOS) of the remote pilot in command.”
According to a news release, “Prior waivers and certifications awarded by the FAA required visual observers (VOs) stationed along the flight path to keep eyes on the airspace at all times, or required other burdensome restrictions such as infrastructure masking. … With this approval, American Robotics’ Scout System is now the first drone technology allowed to continuously operate without this costly human requirement.”
The FAA is restricting American Robotics’ operations to specific rural areas and at altitudes below 400 feet, with a maximum takeoff weight of 20 pounds, The Hill reported. Nevertheless, should AR’s automated Scout System prove safe, pilotless drones may soon be delivering clinical laboratory specimens and supplies to remote areas as well as to more densely populated hospital systems.
The FAA’s Certificate of Waiver is effective until January 31, 2023.
A New Era of Drone Delivery for Hospitals and Clinical Laboratories
Even with the restrictions, the FAA’s decision moves the commercial drone industry ever closer to routine transport of medical laboratory specimens and medical supplies by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV).
“With these approvals, American Robotics is ushering in a new era of widespread automated drone operations,” Reese Mozer, CEO and co-founder of American Robotics, said in the news release. “Decades’ worth of promise and projection are finally coming to fruition. We are proud to be the first company to meet the FAA’s comprehensive safety requirements, which had previously restricted the viability of drone use in the commercial sector.”
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that the FAA’s decision signals the agency’s “broader effort to authorize widespread flights by shifting away from case-by-case exemptions for specific vehicles performing specific tasks.” According to the WSJ, the FAA’s approval documents state that American Robotics’ proposed operations will provide the agency with “critical data for use in evaluating BVLOS [beyond the visual line of sight] operations from offsite locations.”
Each American Robotics Scout drone (above) is stored within a weatherproof base station that enables autonomous charging, data processing, analysis, and data transmission. According to the news release, “Once installed in the field, all facets of Scout’s operation are automated, allowing this technology to gather and analyze ultra-high-resolution data multiple times per day for years without expensive human labor.” Clinical laboratory managers will want to watch for progress in using drones to deliver medical supplies. (Photo copyright: American Robotics.)
FAA Approval a ‘Game Changer’
In its quest to receive FAA approval, American Robotics completed a four-year testing program around its Scout line of UAV products. According to the company, Scout systems flew as many as 10 automated missions per day in 2020 for industrial and agricultural customers in multiple states capturing a variety of advanced data.
The Scout system addresses safety concerns by using acoustic detect-and-avoid technology to maintain a safe distance from other aircraft while also avoiding birds or other potential obstacles.
“The commercial drone industry is growing quickly and providing significant benefits to the American public, but enabling expanded operations beyond visual line of sight is critical for the industry to truly take off,” Lisa Ellman, JD, Partner at Hogan Lovells and Executive Director of the Commercial Drone Alliance, said in the news release.
“Automated beyond visual line of site operations are particularly important to opening the commercial sectors to the drone economy, including the agriculture and industrial verticals. Key to these operations is the use and FAA acceptance of new and innovative safety technologies, such as detect and avoid sensors and software-enabled automation.”
The agricultural and energy industries are seen as key beneficiaries of this latest FAA action. Lance Ruppert, Director of Agronomy Marketing and Technology at Growmark Inc., a leading US grower cooperative, calls the American Robotics’ approval a “game changer.”
“Our interest in American Robotics’ technology started with the desire to have a drone imagery solution that was reliable, scalable, and executed with minimal human resources,” Ruppert said in the news release. “This technology, along with the FAA approvals to operate it without humans on the ground, is key to making drones a widespread reality in our industry.”
Drone Delivery of Clinical Laboratory Specimens Worldwide
And past Dark Daily ebriefings reported on drone delivery of medical supplies being conducted in Virginia, North Carolina, Australia, Switzerland, and Rwanda. With potentially fully automated systems just around the corner, there’s no question the use of drones to transport critical medical supplies and biological specimens is poised for an amazing breakthrough.
While the FAA’s approval of the first fully automated commercial drone flights may not have an immediate impact on clinical laboratories, the increasing use of commercial drones brings drone transportation of lab specimens and other medical supplies one step closer to reality.
The palm-sized device could one day be engineered to track down explosives and gas leaks or could even be used by medical laboratories to detect disease
Here’s a technology breakthrough with many implications for diagnostics and clinical laboratory testing. Researchers at the at the University of Washington (UW) are pushing the envelope on what can be achieved by combining technology with biology. They developed “Smellicopter,” a flying drone that uses a living moth antenna to hunt for odors.
According to their published study, the UW scientists believe an odor-guided drone could “reduce human hazard and drastically improve performance on tasks such as locating disaster survivors, hazardous gas leaks, incipient fires or explosives.”
“Nature really blows our human-made odor sensors out of the water,” lead author Melanie Anderson, a UW doctoral student in mechanical engineering, told UW News. “By using an actual moth antenna with Smellicopter, we’re able to get the best of both worlds: the sensitivity of a biological organism on a robotic platform where we can control its motion.”
The researchers believe their Smellicopter is the first odor-sensing flying biohybrid robot system to incorporate a live moth antenna that capitalizes on the insect’s excellent odor-detecting and odor-locating abilities.
In their paper, titled, “A Bio-Hybrid Odor-Guided Autonomous Palm-Sized Air Vehicle,” published in the IOPscience journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics, the researchers wrote, “Biohybrid systems integrate living materials with synthetic devices, exploiting their respective advantages to solve challenging engineering problems. … Our robot is the first flying biohybrid system to successfully perform odor localization in a confined space, and it is able to do so while detecting and avoiding obstacles in its flight path. We show that insect antennae respond more quickly than metal oxide gas sensors, enabling odor localization at an improved speed over previous flying robots. By using the insect antennae, we anticipate a feasible path toward improved chemical specificity and sensitivity by leveraging recent advances in gene editing.”
How Does it Work?
In nature, a moth uses its antennae to sense chemicals in its environment and navigate toward sources of food or a potential mate.
“Cells in a moth antenna amplify chemical signals,” said study co-author Thomas Daniel, PhD, UW Professor of Biology, in UW News. “The moths do it really efficiently—one scent molecule can trigger lots of cellular responses, and that’s the trick. This process is super-efficient, specific, and fast.”
To keep the moth antennae “alive,” scientists place Manduca sexta hawk moths (above) in a refrigerator to anesthetize them before removing their antennae. Once separated from the live moth, the antenna stays “biologically and chemically active” for up to four hours. Refrigerating the antennas further extends that time span, researchers explained in the UW News article. (Photo copyright: University of Washington.)
Because the moth antenna is hollow, researchers are able to add wires into the ends of the antenna. By connecting the antenna to an electrical circuit, they can measure the average signal from all of the cells in the antenna. When compared to a metal oxide gas sensor, the antenna-powered sensor responded more quickly to a floral scent. It also took less time to recover between tracking puffs of scent.
Anderson compared the antenna-drone circuitry to a human heart monitor.
“A lot like a heart monitor, which measures the electrical voltage that is produced by the heart when it beats, we measure the electrical signal produced by the antenna when it smells odor,” Anderson told WIRED. “And very similarly, the antenna will produce these spike-shaped pulses in response to patches of odor.”
Making a Drone Hunt Like a Moth
Anderson told WIRED her team programmed the drone to hunt for odors using the same technique moths employ to stay targeted on an odor, called crosswind casting.
“If the wind shifts, or you fly a little bit off-course, then you’ll lose the odor,” Anderson said. “And so, you cast crosswind to try and pick back up that trail. And in that way, the Smellicopter gets closer and closer to the odor source.”
However, the researchers had to figure out how to keep the commercially available $195 Crazyflie drone facing upwind. The fix, co-author and co-advisor Sawyer Fuller, PhD, UW Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering told UW News, was to add two plastic fins to create drag and keep the vehicle on course.
“From a robotics perspective, this is genius,” Fuller said. “The classic approach in robotics is to add more sensors, and maybe build a fancy algorithm or use machine learning to estimate wind direction. It turns out, all you need is to add a fin.”
A live moth antenna is attached to wires in an arc sharp on the “Smellicopter” drone (above), developed at the University of Washington in Seattle. The autonomous drone uses the moth antenna to navigate toward smells. By connecting the antenna to a circuit board, the UW researchers were able to study the drone’s response to a puff of floral scent. The Smellicopter tracking skills proved superior to that of a human-made sensor. (Photo copyright: University of Washington.)
Other Applications for Odor Detecting Robots
While any practical clinical application of this breakthrough is years away, the scientific team’s next step is to use gene editing to engineer moths with antennae sensitive to a specific desired chemical, such as those found in explosives.
“I think it is a powerful concept,” roboticist Antonio Loquercio, a PhD candidate in machine learning at the University of Zurich who researches drone navigation, told WIRED. “Nature provides us plenty of examples of living organisms whose life depends on this capacity. This could have as well a strong impact on autonomous machines—not only drones—that could use odors to find, for example, survivors in the aftermath of an earthquake or could identify gas leaks in a man-made environment.”
Could a palm-sized autonomous device one day be used to not only track down explosives and gas leaks but also to detect disease?
As clinical pathologists and medical laboratory scientists know, dogs have demonstrated keen ability to detect disease using their heightened sense of smell.
Therefore, it is not inconceivable that smell-seeking technology might one day be part of clinical laboratory testing for certain diseases.
This latest research is another example of how breakthroughs in unrelated fields of science offer the potential for creation of diagnostic tools that one day may be useful to medical laboratories.
Coronavirus pandemic expected to spur wider acceptance of drone delivery services for clinical laboratory specimens and medical supplies
Routine delivery of clinical laboratory specimens and medical supplies by drone moved one step closer to reality with news that Walmart (NYSE:WMT), Quest Diagnostics (NYSE:DGX), and DroneUp of Virginia Beach, Va., are partnering to bring at-home self-collection COVID-19 test kits to residents of several areas hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.
In its race to keep pace with online retailer Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Walmart last September implemented two drone-delivery trials. One, according to Progressive Grocer, is with Tel Aviv, Israel-based drone company Flytrex, to deliver select grocery and household essentials in and around Fayetteville, N.C. The other trial program is with drone company Zipline of San Francisco, to test delivery of certain health and wellness products to areas around Walmart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., Progressive Grocer also reported.
Then, Walmart announced a third pilot project for home delivery—one that could potentially affect clinical laboratories. This time, in collaboration with Quest and DroneUp, Walmart is piloting delivery of at-home COVID-19 collection kits in North Las Vegas, and Cheektowaga, New York, a Walmart news release stated.
Is this yet another example of how the COVID-19 pandemic will continue to drive shifts in delivery of key healthcare services? Probably.
According to Walmart’s news release, “Patients who qualify for drone delivery of the COVID-19 self-collection kits must live in a single-family residence within a 1-mile radius of the designated [Walmart] Supercenters in North Las Vegas and Cheektowaga. The kits will land on the driveway, front sidewalk, or backyard of the customer’s home, depending on where there are cars and trees. There is no delivery or kit cost for customers electing to receive an at-home [COVID-19] kit delivered via drone. Once the kits are delivered, the person will perform a self-administered nasal swab in the privacy of their home and send their sample back to Quest Diagnostics for testing using the included prepaid shipping label.”
Click the image to watch the short video that demonstrates Walmart’s home delivery service of at-home COVID-19 test kits. Clinical laboratories in these areas may wonder how Walmart’s new drone-delivery service will impact their own specimen delivery programs. (Photo/video copyright: Walmart.)
The giant retailer’s expanding use of drone delivery systems will likely lead to greater acceptance among consumers of unmanned aerial vehicles for delivering all sorts of personal items, as well as various types of clinical laboratory specimens. If consumers embrace drone delivery systems, clinical laboratories with existing courier and logistics networks may experience another disruption in how they do business.
In a news release following the announcement of a yet another drone-delivery service of COVID-19 at-home test kits—this time in El Paso, Texas,—Amanda Jenkins, Vice President of Operation Support and Implementation, Walmart US Health and Wellness, said, “Walmart has been serving the El Paso community throughout the pandemic with drive-thru testing sites and extended testing hours, and we wanted to provide another way to access testing that provides convenience and leverages technology, while learning how drones could impact the delivery of healthcare in the future,” KTSM-9 TV reported.
Drone Delivery Systems Worldwide for Healthcare
The United States is not the only country turning to drone technology to speed deliveries and reduce person-to-person contact during the pandemic. A World Economic Forum blog post outlined the critical role drones are playing in China, the world’s most populated country, as it responds to the health crisis.
“At the moment of life and death, the air transport network can significantly confine the flow of people, avoid unnecessary physical contact, and prevent secondary transmission,” Lv Yinxiang, Secretary of the Party Committee of the County People’s Hospital, said in the blog post. “Medical samples delivered through air can shrink the delivery time … while saving precious field resources.”
Amazon also is predicting a bright future for drone delivery of all types of goods. In August, Amazon’s Prime Air drone delivery service received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to operate its fleet of drones, CNBC reported. Amazon launched its drone project in 2013 and began the process of seeking FAA approval in 2019.
And in “WakeMed Uses Drone to Deliver Patient Specimens,” Dark Daily’s sister publication, The Dark Report (TDR), reported on UPS’ launch of a drone delivery service on the WakeMed Health and Hospitals medical campus in Raleigh, N.C. The implementation followed a two-year test period during which UPS used drones manufactured by Matternet of Menlo Park, Calif., to fly clinical laboratory specimens from a medical complex of physicians’ offices to the health system’s clinical laboratory.
COVID-19 Pandemic Drives Drone Delivery System Development
Tom Ward, Walmart’s Senior Vice President for Customer Product, predicts the drone delivery systems being rolled out during the COVID-19 pandemic will increase the use of contactless delivery for all types of deliveries, not just healthcare.
“There’s a lot we can learn from our drone delivery pilots to help determine what roles drones can play in pandemic response, healthcare delivery, and retail,” he said in the Walmart news release. “We hope drone delivery of self-collection kits will shape contactless testing capabilities on a larger scale and continue to bolster the innovative ways Walmart plans to use drone delivery in the future.”
The widespread use of drone technology appears to be soaring to new heights as the COVID-19 pandemic moves forward into the new year. Clinical laboratory managers will want to keep their eyes on the skies as this new delivery system becomes more commonplace and potentially disrupts the way laboratory specimens traditionally have traveled to and from medical laboratories.
Delivery of clinical laboratory specimens and medical supplies by drone is beginning to happen in different parts of the world
The idea that fleets of flying drones may someday legally transport clinical laboratory specimens may sound good—it may even be beneficial from a healthcare perspective—but it also could be hugely disruptive to medical labs that maintain large and expensive courier/logistics capabilities.
So, the announcement that the FAA had granted approval to Amazon’s new drone delivery fleet—Amazon Prime Air—may come as something of a mixed blessing to clinical laboratory managers and large healthcare networks.
Nevertheless, it’s done. Amazon Prime Air has joined Alphabet Inc’s Wing and the United Parcel Services’ Flight Forward as “the only companies that have gotten FAA approval to operate under the federal regulations governing charter operators and small airlines,” Bloomberg reported.
But will this trend bode well for clinical laboratories?
Does Amazon Plan to Deliver Clinical Laboratory Specimens?
As yet, Amazon has not announced its intention to deliver clinical laboratory specimens. But given the company’s trajectory as a disrupter of traditional retail and shipping industries, it seems reasonable that competing with Wing and Flight Forward might be part of Amazon’s plan.
Wing and UPS are already operating fledgling clinical laboratory delivery networks in the US and other nations, such as Australia and Switzerland. Wing has been testing limited drone deliveries in Christiansburg, VA, since it received FAA approval to operate drone deliveries last year. UPS received similar approval last year to operate drones to deliver biological specimens and clinical laboratory supplies between physicians’ offices and the central clinical laboratory on WakeMed’s medical campus in Raleigh, NC.
Amazon’s MK27 drone (above) is a hybrid aircraft that can take off and land vertically like a helicopter and sustain forward flight. The drone has several built-in safety features, including thermal cameras, depth cameras, onboard computers and sonar to detect hazards in its path and navigate around them. Click here to watch a video of the drone in flight. (Video copyright: Amazon.)
Amazon’s drones can fly up to 7.5 miles from a distribution site (a 15-mile round trip) and can deliver packages that weigh less than five pounds to customers. The goal is to deliver small items that can fit in the drone’s cargo box to consumers in under 30 minutes.
Are Drones the Future of Medical Laboratory Specimen Delivery?
Routine deliveries via drones are still a long way off as more trial runs are needed and the FAA has to develop standards and regulations for drone delivery operations to maintain order in the skies. However, in a statement, the FAA said it is trying to support innovation in the expanding drone arena while ensuring that the devices operate safely. The FAA plans to finalize a set of regulations for drones by the end of this year, Bloomberg reported.
“This certification is an important step forward for Prime Air and indicates the FAA’s confidence in Amazon’s operating and safety procedures for an autonomous drone delivery service that will one day deliver packages to our customers around the world,” David Carbon, Vice President Prime Air at Amazon, said in a statement to Business Insider. “We will continue to develop and refine our technology to fully integrate delivery drones into the airspace and work closely with the FAA and other regulators around the world to realize our vision of 30-minute delivery.”
So, will Amazon one day announce plans to deliver medical supplies and clinical laboratory specimens in under 30 minutes too? It wouldn’t be unreasonable to believe in the possibility.
Dark Daily previously covered similar drone delivery services under development for healthcare situations around the world. In “Drones Used to Deliver Clinical Laboratory Specimens in Switzerland,” we reported how a multiple-facility hospital group in Switzerland was using drones to deliver lab samples between two of their locations.
In “WakeMed Uses Drone to Deliver Patient Specimens,” our sister publication, The Dark Report, covered how in April, 2019, clinical lab professionals at WakeMed Health and Hospitals completed the first successful revenue-generating commercial transport of lab supplies by drone in the United States. The satellite lab now sends urine, blood, and other patient specimens for routine testing to the main lab.
Dark Daily also reported in 2017 that researchers from Johns Hopkins University had successfully flown a drone carrying lab specimens more than 161 miles across the Arizona desert, setting a US record for the longest distance drone delivery of viable medical specimens.
Amazon would fit right in.
Though regular drone delivery of medical supplies and clinical laboratory specimens may take some time to develop, it is a trend that laboratory managers should watch closely. The potential for drones to safely and inexpensively transport clinical laboratory specimens could become a reality sooner than expected.
Through partnerships with CVS, Utah Health, and Kaiser Permanente the new UPSFF drone service could deliver savings to healthcare consumers and reduced TATs for clinical laboratories
United Parcel Service (UPS) successfully delivered by air medical prescriptions from a CVS pharmacy to customers’ residences in Cary N.C. This was the next step in the package delivery company’s plan to become a major player in the use of drones in healthcare and it has major implications for clinical laboratories and pathology groups.
Earlier this year, Dark Daily’s sister publication, The Dark Report (TDR), covered UPS’ launch of a drone delivery service on the WakeMed Health and Hospitals medical campus in Raleigh, N.C. The implementation followed a two-year test period during which UPS used drones manufactured by Matternet, a company in Menlo Park, Calif., to fly clinical laboratory specimens from a medical complex of physicians’ offices to the health system’s clinical laboratory more than 100 times. (See TDR, “WakeMed Uses Drone to Deliver Patient Specimens,” April 8, 2019.)
At the 24th Annual Executive War College on Lab and Pathology Management in April, Chairman and CEO David Abney (above) explained why UPS is investing in drone technology for clinical laboratory health network delivery. “Healthcare is a strategic imperative for us,” Abney said. “We deliver a lot of important things, but lab [shipments] are critical, and they’re very much a part of patient care.” (Photo copyright: Dark Daily.)
In October, UPS signed a letter of intent with CVS Health to “explore drone deliveries, expanding UPS’ sights from hospital campuses to the homes of CVS customers as it builds out its drone delivery subsidiary,” Modern Healthcare reported.
In November, UPS succeeded in these goals with UPS Flight Forward, Inc. (UPSFF), UPS’ new drone delivery service which, according to its website, is the first “drone airline” to receive full Part 135 certification (Package Delivery by Drone) from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
“This drone delivery, the first of its kind in the industry, demonstrates what’s possible for our customers who can’t easily make it into our stores,” said Kevin Hourican, EVP, CVS Health and President of CVS Pharmacy, in a UPS press release. “CVS is exploring many types of delivery options for urban, suburban, and rural markets. We see big potential in drone delivery in rural communities where life-saving medications are needed and consumers at times cannot conveniently access one of our stores.”
Drones Deliver Clinical Lab Specimens and Pharmaceuticals
Since March, UPSFF has completed more than 1,500 drone
flights (with 8,000 clinical laboratory samples) at WakeMed in Raleigh, N.C.
UPS’ drone delivery decreased delivery time of clinical laboratory specimens
between WakeMed’s physician office building to the hospital-based lab from 19
minutes to three minutes, according to UPS data reported in October by an Advisory
Board daily briefing.
WakeMed is seeking to “provide advantages in patient care
that cannot be obtained in any other way” Michael
Weinstein, MD, PhD, Director of Pathology Laboratories at WakeMed, told TDR.
With the signing of the UPS (NYSE:UPS)-UPSFF (UPS Flight
Forward)-CVS (NYSE:CVS.N) agreement in October—and initial first flights which
took place on November 1 between a CVS pharmacy and customers’ residences in
Cary, NC—UPS completed the “the first revenue-generating drone delivery of a
medical prescription from a CVS pharmacy directly to a consumer’s home,” the
UPS press release states.
“When we launched UPS Flight Forward, we said we would move quickly to scale this business … and that’s exactly what we are doing,” Scott Price (above), UPS Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer, told Supply Chain Dive. “We started with a hospital campus environment and are now expanding scale and use-cases,” he added. Clinical laboratories can probably look forward to similar UPS drone delivery services in all 50 states and Washington, DC. (Photo copyright: UPS.)
Other Healthcare Organizations on Board
WakeMed and CVS are not alone in UPS drone deployment for
healthcare deliveries. Advisory Board reported that UPSFF also partnered
with other healthcare systems to provide drone flights for on-campus delivery of
pharmaceuticals and medical supplies, including:
AmerisourceBergen:
to move pharmaceuticals, supplies, and records to “qualifying” medical
campuses;
Kaiser
Permanente: to send medical supplies between buildings at different campus
sites; and
University
of Utah Health’s hospital campuses: to transport biological samples,
documents, supplies, and medical instruments between their facilities.
Drone delivery of clinical laboratory specimens is swiftly become a global reality that labs should watch closely. Past Dark Daily e-briefings reported on drone deliveries being conducted in Virginia, North Carolina, Australia, Switzerland, and Rwanda.
Pathologists and medical laboratory managers need to stay
abreast of these developments, as widespread drone delivery of clinical laboratory
specimens may happen on a surprisingly fast timeline. Drone delivery already
has TAT improvement implications and could be a way for labs to differentiate
their businesses and enhance workflow.
