Public Funding for Inteliports Limited

Drone technology has the potential to revolutionise healthcare processes across the UK by increasing the responsiveness of services at reduced costs. These benefits are enabled by automated systems and the reduction of labour within the chain. However, as we remove human oversight, the need to ensure compliance to existing or new SOPs by independent automated systems becomes even greater. In the cases of infectious substances within pathology, rare blood transfusion and organ delivery, provenance and full status monitoring are essential. Moreover, assigning delivery priority and tracking to these types of goods in the logistics chain can greatly ensure safer healthcare. Status monitoring must be executed on a parcel-by-parcel level, handovers between modalities need to be seamless and the transactions must be securely recorded. Cross-platform multimodality (vans and drones) allows for the gradual introduction of drone services, but importantly, enables future healthcare logistics to adapt to needs and challenges of the environment. For example, if there is congestion, fire or flooding, re-routing parcels via drones would be a go-to solution. Whereas, during storms, the use of manned vans would be the only solution despite the higher cost per delivery. Resilience within the logistics system is built when the package integrity, handover mode and data tracking are agnostic to the modality, thus allowing the chosen mode to adapt to the environment. The project addresses the three challenges above by creating a system designed to accurately and efficiently integrate current and future SOPs and healthcare logistics - particularly the drone use case. This is necessary so that, as drone regulations open over the next couple of years, the critical element (the package), will be ready to meet the needs of the CAA, MHRA and NHS. It will have already been validated within multi-modal transport using established provenance tracking processes and instantly compliant with commercial automated drone services.

Autonomous drones for logistics are just around the corner and they represent a paradigm shift in how we will move goods around the UK. However, in order to benefit from these autonomous flights, there must be autonomous ground systems too, otherwise the operation quickly becomes commercially un-viable as teams of people are needed at each end. Inteliports and Motion Robotics is developing the robotics that automates the entire ground operation to allow for true end to end autonomous logistics. Project AIDA will test the feasibility of using deep neural networks to synchronise the collaboration of all Inteliports' robotic systems so as to maximise the objective of efficiency, accuracy and interoperability between drone ports. AIDA aims to remove the cognitive complexity experienced by human managers from the logistics loop, allowing humans to manage at a higher level of oversight, devolving boring repetitive tasks to the robots and thereby increasing productivity, scalability and safety. AIDA is especially useful when collaborating within a network of multiple drone-ports where the complexity of operations becomes exponentially complex. Advancing the state of the art, the study will test the feasibility of a specific solution for simulating the Deep Reinforcement Learning Training environment in such a way it perfectly matches the real world drone port and can be achieved efficiently though the use of statistical modelling. Moreover once fully trained we will show that the trained network can drive the systems in the real world.