Zürich , 24 March 2014: The IBM Intelligent Operations Center (IOC) greeted potential FDC participants at the first Flying Donkey Challenge Technical Workshop with the premise: “Can we use IOC as a Master Control System, with links to the authorities such as the KCAA, for the FDC starting in Kenya by November 2014?”
The Workshop began with a keynote by Oliver Evans, Chairman of The International Air Cargo Association & Chief Cargo Officer Swiss WorldCargo.
Simon Johnson, Co-Founder, led the Workshop to address a simple objective to demonstrate how IOC could be used to track the location, log the status and send commands (e.g. Abort Flight) to multiple UAVs via operators’ Ground Control Stations.
Selected entrants provided presentations on their team solutions: senseFly, University of Southampton, University of Bristol, Barnard Microsystems Limited, Praxis Aerospace, and the University of Zurich .
Afterwards, the attendees formed teams to work on best practices and recommendations.
About The Nevada Twenty-Mule Team
The Nevada Twenty-Mule Team draws its name from the great Nevada mule teams that hauled minerals across the blistering deserts of Death Valley over 100 years ago. These trains traveled 162 miles from Furnace Creek in Death Valley to Mojave, California; and from the mines at Old Borate to Dagget, the nearest railroad points. Their routes carried them over some of the most forbidding land on the face of the earth: parched and shifting sands of the desert, and dry and rocky ravines of the Funeral Mountains.
The successful transportation of minerals out of Death Valley by the 20-Mule Team is the highest development of this method of transportation, and speaks volumes for the ingenuity and ability of the past.
About The Flying Donkey Challenge
The Flying Donkey Challenge is an escalating series of sub-challenges held annually in Africa. World-leading roboticists, engineers, regulators, entrepreneurs, logisticians, and designers will win substantial grants by advancing the safety, durability, legality, profitability and friendliness of flying-parcel carriers on a massive scale. Before 2020, with world media attention, the sub-challenges will culminate in a race of Flying Donkeys* around Mount Kenya in under 24 hours, delivering and collecting 20 kilo payloads along the way. The winner(s) will collect a multi-million dollar prize. *Cargo robots with a maximum takeoff weight of 60 kilos
The event is open to worldwide entrants but non-African teams entering the Flying Donkey Challenge must collaborate with a recognised higher education African school or laboratory.
You can read more about the Flying Donkey Challenge here, in this article and in this article here.