Drones are being used to carry Covid-19 test samples and other medical materials up to 40 miles (64km) across four locations in western Scotland. London drone firm Skyports has become the first operator to receive permission from the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to carry diagnostic specimens by drone. Cargo – including test samples, medicine, personal protective equipment (PPE) and Covid-19 testing kits – is being transported by the drones in the Argyll & Bute region. A whole fleet of the drones are carrying up to 3kg of the supplies each, improving services for patients and healthcare staff in one of the UK's most remote areas. Drones can complete a journey that takes a whopping 36 hours by road and ferry to just 15 minutes, while increasing the frequency of pick-ups.

The UK's new Space Agency funding will be used to support drones that deliver coronavirus testing kits to a Scottish island. Skyports, the company behind the drones, started a two-week trial in May with NHS Highland, which serves a group of islands off the west coast of Scotland. The technology was able to cut delivery times between Oban and the Isle of Mull to around 15 minutes, instead of going via road and taking a 45-minute ferry crossing. An initial £2.6 million was made available by the UK Space Agency and European Space Agency (ESA) to find and support space-enabled technologies and services that can support the NHS response to coronavirus. Skyports along with two other initiatives have been awarded a share of £1.1 million in funding, while the rest is open to bids until the end of September.

Uber Eats has unveiled its newest drones which will be used to deliver food in San Diego, California, next year. The new drones feature'innovative rotating wings with six rotors' - a design that has previously only been featured in flying car prototypes. Uber Eats said it believes the rotating wings will help to avoid food spillages, as the design enables a smoother transition between vertical takeoff and forward flight. Today, the company unveiled a new look for its drone, which utilises'innovative rotating wings with six rotors', a design that's usually only featured in flying car prototypes The rotors will be positioned vertically for takeoff and landing, but move into a forward position'for increased speed and efficiency during cruise flight', reports The Verge. NASA veteran Mark Moore designed similar rotors for the company's flying-taxi prototype which is also part of the companies Uber Elevate project - to take its services to the sky.

Air taxis are poised to be an additional mode of transportation in major cities suffering from ground transportation congestion. Among several potential applications of air taxis, we focus on their use within a city to transport passengers to nearby airports. Specifically, we consider the problem of determining optimal locations for skyports (enabling pick-up of passengers to airport) within a city. Our approach is inspired from hub location problems, and our proposed method optimizes for aggregate travel time to multiple airports while satisfying the demand (trips to airports) either via (i) ground transportation to skyport followed by an air taxi to the airport, or (ii) direct ground transportation to the airport. The number of skyports is a constraint, and the decision to go via the skyport versus direct ground transportation is a variable in the optimization problem. Extensive experiments on publicly available airport trips data from New York City (NYC) show the efficacy of our optimization method implemented using Gurobi. In addition, we share insightful results based on the NYC data set on how ground transportation congestion can impact the demand and service efficiency in such skyports; this emerges as yet another factor in deciding the optimal number of skyports and their locations for a given city.

Uber has teased a look at what its futuristic Skyport flying taxi hubs could be like when UberAir comes to life. At the firm's Elevate Summit in Los Angeles, Uber unveiled elaborate concept images of the Connect system developed by Corgan that could provide infrastructure for the vertical take-off and landing craft. The modular system can essentially be installed anywhere, be it an open site, atop a parking garage, or even on the roof of a skyscraper, according to Corgan. Uber has teased a look at what its futuristic Skyport flying taxi hubs could be like. At the firm's Elevate Summit in Los Angeles, Uber unveiled elaborate concept images of the Connect system developed by Corgan that could provide infrastructure for UberAir Uber has plans to begin its first flight demonstrations as soon as 2020, and begin taking passengers by 2023.

One major caveat, however, is that unlike regular taxis which can freely zip about the streets, UberAIR taxis need access to the sky and a place to land. That's where "Skyports" come in: special areas localized specifically for launching, landing, and customer pickup, and they're looking appropriately futuristic. During the second day of Uber's Elevate Summit 2018, the company revealed concepts for its air taxi ports. While still at the early developmental stages, Uber plans to support over 4,000 passengers per hour, per Skyport. These initial blueprints come from Corgan, an architecture firm keen on "transforming urban air mobility" with what it calls "Connect," an infrastructure that will enable up to 1,000 Uber eVTOLs (Electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing) each hour.

Earlier this year, a small robotic helicopter flying through the Bavarian Alps made more than 100 deliveries between two villages that are within yodeling distance of each other but so far from anything else that they may as well be on Mars. The Paketkopter carried medicine and other small parcels through wind and snow without the slightest problem, even as Amazon and Google and UPS hone their autonomous tech and try not to hit anything. The little drone that could flew from one "Skyport" to another at 45 mph, turning into a half-hour slog by truck into an eight-minute hop. "We purposely chose the test area to pose a new and bigger challenge," says DHL spokesperson Dunja Kuhlmann. The German shipping company started experimenting with drones in 2013, sending small parcels across the Rhine on a quadcopter.