This is a quick demonstration to show how the precision landing system for our delivery drones will be able to find and then track the landing pad to land and drop the delivery exactly where it needs to go.

We don’t have mailing addresses in the ocean so the drone uses GPS coordinates to navigate to the Pod, but GPS can only give us accuracy within a few meters, it isn’t enough to safely land on the landing pad. The floating homes may move slightly with the currents or wind so GPS isn’t reliable enough to get the drone to the landing pad.

So after the drone uses GPS to get in the area of the Pod, the onboard cameras will locate the infrared(IR) tag which it will use to guide itself to the landing pad. This IR tag is accurate to the centimeter or less so the drone can land exactly where it needs to land, every single time. We went with infrared because we needed this system to work at night or in weather conditions where the landing area won’t be clearly visible. Infrared will still work in the dark, in foggy or rainy conditions, and in any other condition that might obstruct the view.

You can see in the video below that the sensors are accurate to less than a centimeter and when Omer moves the target, the sensors see that and adjust their measurements. This will work the same way when the target is stationary and the drone is moving in the air. When the drone finds this IR tag and guides itself to the landing pad, it will land and release the payload before taking off to return to shore.

This entire system had to be custom built and we have a lot of pride in the way things are taking shape for this drone. It has been a lot of hard work but we feel that we really have a ground-breaking product that will make life easier on the SeaPod and maybe even change the way the world looks at drone deliveries.