Another African leapfrog: First Drone Highway could be operational in Rwanda 'by 2016'

According to Afrotech, the first cargo robot route could be operating in Rwanda by 2016. Although at present, the maximum weight that can be carried is around 9kg, the company believes that by 2020, the flying robot technology will be capable of taking 20kg over distances of several hundred kilometres.

The architects points out that it is unlikely that countries will be able to invest sufficient capital in road and rail provision to meet the needs of the continent’s future population, which is expected to double to 2.2 billion by 2050.

IN THE past year or so, drones have increasingly been mentioned as a possible solution to Africa’s infrastructure problems, helping the continent leapfrog poor or non-existent road and rail networks straight into air transportation.

Although drones are more infamously known for their applications in security – such as surveillance and targeted executions – but Africa’s cargo drone highway came closer to reality last week when futurist organisation Afrotech and British architects Foster + Partners launched proposals for a “droneport” in Rwanda to help get cargo to communities with poor access to roads.

Cargo drones are small pilotless airplanes designed to transport packages across distances of 80km or so.

Many companies, including Amazon and Google, have already been looking into the commercial potential of unmanned flying vehicles, which to date have typically been used for surveillance and filming purposes. Drones are already being used in countries like Zimbabwe to track elephant and rhino poachers.

Rwanda is an ideal location to test out the impact of the commercial drone highway, said Jonathan Ledgard of Afrotech. The country – and the same could be said for much of Africa – has a relatively open airspace.

Rwanda, for example, has just a handful of commercial flights in and out of the country each day, while in industrial countries, the skies are dense not just with planes but power lines, making drones more of a nuisance.

Northern Ethiopia, too, features remote villages and steep mountain passes connected by winding dirt roads. Cargo drone delivery could find many applications in these, and other, contexts.

The drone lines will initially be on two routes – a “red line” that will carry small packages of emergency units blood to remote health clinics, and later, a “blue line” or commercial routes for the delivery of conventional cargo ordered online.

Drones could account for 10% -15% of Africa’s transport sector in the next decade, Legard believes.

Credit: mgafrica.com