Autonomous Drone Delivery of Medical Supplies to Care Homes for Covid-19 Rapid Response

新冠肺炎已经严重影响了人类各行各业。紧急服务机构、政府和执法机构在应对新冠肺炎以及实施严格措施减少病毒传播的过程中不堪重负。由于医生和护士不得不轮班工作，医疗保健部门面临着拯救受影响公民生命的巨大压力。无人人寿(UML)建议通过向疗养院部署医疗用品的自主交付来协助政府和整个医疗保健部门。由牛津郡议会作为联合调查员。我们将共同合作，部署自动无人机，从药店安全及时地将医疗用品(包括急性药物和一些轻型个人防护装备)运送到疗养院，为抗击新冠肺炎的患者提供护理。预计这将显著降低疗养院的感染风险，疗养院是受新冠肺炎影响最大的行业之一。目前，新冠肺炎医疗用品通过专门的快递服务递送。这种人工运送医疗用品的过程缓慢且效率低下，导致周转时间较长，取药时可能对信使和病人造成污染，而且由于城市地区的高需求，农村地区缺乏业务覆盖范围。综上所述，这类手术的成本可能相当高，导致那些财力有限的人获得的机会更有限。通过部署自主无人机运送，我们确保了医疗用品的快速周转时间，减少了对快递员的污染，以更低的成本增加了运送物资的数量，从而拯救了更多的生命。这项研究将提供一种可扩展的商业模式，以扩大这项服务的范围(多次送货、多家药店、为医院和家庭提供服务)，并弥合使用无人机交付牛津大学正在试验的新冠肺炎疫苗的知识和技能差距。统一建模语言的自主即服务软件平台已经被Verizon、瑞士邮政等主要企业客户以及维也纳市政府等部署，用于从室内物流到自主搜索和救援的各种用例。

Covid-19 has severely impacted all walks of human life. Emergency services, governments and law enforcement agencies are overwhelmed in tackling Covid-19 as well as implementing strict measures to reduce the spread of the virus. The healthcare sector has come under immense pressure to save the lives of affected citizens with doctors and nurses having to work double-shifts. Unmanned Life (UML) proposes to assist governments and the healthcare sector as a whole by deploying Autonomous Delivery of Medical Supplies to Care Homes. With Oxfordshire County Council as co-investigator. Together, we will collaborate to conduct industrial research on deploying autonomous UAVs that deliver medical supplies (including acute medicine and some lightweight PPE) from pharmacies, securely and timely to care homes for patients fighting Covid-19\. This is expected to significantly decrease the risk of infection at care homes, which is one of the most impacted sectors from the COVID-19 pandemic.Currently, COVID-19 medical supplies are delivered by dedicated courier services. This process of delivering medical supplies manually is slow and inefficient resulting in the lengthy turnaround time, potential contamination of couriers and patients when collecting the medication as well as lack of operational coverage for rural areas due to a high demand within urban areas. Adding all up, the cost of such operation can be quite high resulting in more limited accessibility for those ones with limited financial resources. By deploying autonomous drone delivery, we ensure a quick turnaround time for medical supplies, reduce the contamination of couriers, increase the number of supplies delivered at a lower cost and thus save more lives. The research will provide a scalable business model to increase the scope of the service (multiple drop-offs, multiple pharmacies, services to hospitals and homes) and bridge the knowledge and skills gap to use drones for delivery of COVID-19 vaccine being trialled at Oxford. UML's Autonomy-as-a-Service software platform has already been deployed by major enterprise customers like Verizon, Swiss Post etc. as well as governments like the City of Vienna for use cases ranging from indoor logistics to autonomous search and rescue.