Hyderabad startup to facilitate grocery delivery via drone

Hyderabad: After successfully piloting a long-haul drone for delivering medicines and other diagnostic needs, drones are now being used by food and grocery delivery companies. And Hyderabad-based startup Marut Dronetech is playing a vital role in providing drones to the food and grocery delivery company Swiggy.

The logistics and delivery platform Swiggy had announced that it is planning to deploy drones on a trial basis to make grocery delivery through its Instamart. The facility will not be available for customers, but the delivery will be from one warehouse to another. And for this, it has roped in Marut Dronetech along with other companies to conduct the trials.

“In the drone delivery segment, we were able to complete the pilot for the Telangana government-led Medicine from the Sky project. We had done almost 10 days of 300 flights in Telangana alone and have over 1,000 flights in India. Through the Medicine from the Sky project we were able to demonstrate that drones can carry heavy payloads of up to 16 kg with temperature controller boxes for different needs,” says Prem K Vislawath, founder of Marut Dronetech.

He adds that drone delivery is a novel thing for India and other States are also adopting the project. The company used a Helicopter which is a heavy payload, long-range drone paired to a custom developed modular temperature-controlled box (patent pending) platform that can safely and reliably deliver multiple medical payloads simultaneously and improve access to vaccines, lab samples, and possibly on-demand medical products to primary health centres and sub-centres in rural, remote, and hard to reach areas.

“With this success, we were then selected by Swiggy to do their pilot for Hyderabad which may commence from June. These drones will be used to transfer groceries and other items from one store to another or from a store to a common customer point, and they are currently not looking at drone delivery to customers. We are hoping that once a private company-led project kicks off it will push other companies who are into medical logistics and delivery segments to look at drones for delivery,” he informed.

Marut Dronetech is one of the few companies that have been allowed a conditional exemption from the Ministry of Civil Aviation to conduct beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) experimental flights.