UST035

45 design optimisation,” says Yuri Fattah, lead guide for the project. “They’ve recently built a wind tunnel there and they wanted to test it, so they’ll study the aerodynamics of the Ambular 2.0, the results of which are expected in the next month or so. “We’ve also been contacted by the Second Research Institute of the Civil Aviation Administration of China. Their research focuses on UAVs, so they’re putting our digital files on Ambular into their Drone-UAM [Urban Air Mobility] simulator to run some additional simulation and testing, which is also due to conclude soon. “These combined research findings will feed into our next-generation Ambular 2.5 model. Our roadmap is set around iterating the prototype every six months or so with new design improvements over the next two or three years.” Operationally, the Ambular team’s concept is that when a medical emergency is identified, a patient or person on hand could request hospital assistance by phone, potentially transmitting their GNSS coordinates via a smartphone app. Subsequently, some AI flight management software allocates an Ambular, flight waypoints and the nearest available paramedic for assistance before it heads for the patient’s location. Additional work by the engineers is focused on a ‘Pod’ Ambular 2.0, which would drop an ICU pod at a requested location. Fattah notes that many hospitals and medical services dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic have parked their ambulances outside patients’ homes to care for them inside the vehicle, to avoid having to take them to already overworked intensive care units. To that end, an autonomous delivery of an ICU pod could serve as a faster and less expensive method of supplying respirators, particularly to ships, or rural areas that are difficult for ambulances to reach. On that same logic, Fattah and his colleagues are also working on smaller delivery quadcopters for transporting emergency medical supplies. In the future, the Ambular team plans to progress to working on an Ambular 3.0. This is at the concept stage at the moment, but it is expected to feature shrouded propellers and capacity for four passengers. The team plans to work with eHang, which has joined the project as a partner, to prototype the Ambular 3.0 before making their work available as open source information. Companies will be able to develop it for productionisation and to inform regulators about the potential requirements for integrating UAM systems into national airspace. Emergency services | Insight Unmanned Systems Technology | December/January 2021 The Ambular project is being developed by a team in Montreal to explore the potential for urban air mobility ambulances (Courtesy of Ambular) MissionGO uses a Velos Rotors electric helicopter for its organ deliveries. It has extensive redundancies, vibration damping and a ballistic parachute to keep the organs safe (Courtesy of MissionGO)