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Yunqi Li
      |     Gear     |    19h ago


THIS UAE-BASED DRONE COMPANY WANTS TO TAKEOVER MENA’S DELIVERY MARKET


UVL ROBOTICS, A UAE-BASED ROBOTICS COMPANY IS BROADENING THE SCOPE OF COMMERCIAL
DRONE DELIVERIES IN THE REGION.

 * 
   

 PHOTOGRAPH: UVL Robotics

Eugene Grankin sits across from me at a table in a small WeWork meeting room in
Abu Dhabi after rushing back from a meeting with potential investors who were
interested in his drones. Grankin’s company, UVL Robotics, is the first to
provide commercial drone delivery operations in the MENA region. Now, it’s
preparing for trial flights in Abu Dhabi, and the emirate consists of over 200
islands. “It all depends on the graders,” Grankin says in a relaxed tone. “If
they rate us well, we could soon get the permission to fly in Abu Dhabi.”







Grankin has good reason to be confident. He has ten years of experience in the
logistics industry and a thorough understanding of the Middle East market. These
assets give UVL Robotics an edge in the region. He began his career in logistics
at Shell, where he was responsible for warehouse and transport operations. The
slow, often overwhelming process of inventory management prompted his vision of
using drones in logistics. Towards the end of his career at Shell, Grankin met
Dmitry Teslenko and  Moosa Al Balushi, who later became his co-founders. Since
there were no drones that could fly indoors and perform inventory scanning at
the time, they decided to build their own drone, and that was how UVL Robotics
was founded in 2018.

Today, inventory management is one of the two pillars of UVL Robotics’ business.
In Europe, UVL Robotics’ drones can scan 300 to 750 pallets on just one battery
at a rate of less than five seconds per scan. It provides a regular drone
inventory service to over 30 clients, doing stock-taking at more than 50 sites.
PepsiCo, the global beverage giant, implemented UVL Robotics’ inventory drones
in their regular operations in 2019. With the warehouse-based business
successful and growing, another idea emerged in Grankin’s mind. “I didn’t want
to have only one line of business,” he says. “I wanted to explore more ambitious
applications, and I realized that I could disrupt the last-mile delivery market
with drones. So, we started thinking about delivery drones.”







It was in 2021, when the ferocious tropical cyclone Shaheen hit Oman, that
Grankin found the ideal opportunity to deploy his delivery drones. Shaheen
slammed into the capital, Muscat, killing 13 people, causing evacuations from
coastal areas and delaying flights. “We were thinking maybe we can help people
there with our drones,” Grankin says. “We could deliver medicine to remote areas
where it took a long time to reach by car.” After reaching out to hospitals, the
police department, and the Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information
Technology, UVL Robotics eventually obtained permission to deliver medicine in
the aftermath of the cyclone.



 * 
   



This milestone humanitarian mission marked a significant point in the growth of
UVL Robotics. “We then gained the confidence to tell our clients that if we can
deliver medicine in such difficult and complicated conditions, we can certainly
do it for daily food and parcel deliveries,” Grankin says. In 2022, UVL Robotics
launched its first commercial daily drone deliveries in Oman after getting BVLOS
(beyond visual line of sight, where a drone is operated beyond the sight of the
pilot) approval from the Omani governorates to operate regular drone deliveries.
Its delivery drones can cover 150 km, with a three-hour flight duration on a
single battery charge, and can carry up to 10 kg. As impressive as that may be,
there’s still a litany of issues to work through. From privacy, security, flying
conditions and routing, to charging and reverse logistics like returning
parcels, every detail needs to be considered. The drones are equipped with
parachute and anti-collision systems and can be paired with their landing pads
for loading and unloading. The company is also developing more precise
operations through computer vision while avoiding the privacy issues that
accompany the use of cameras.

Naturally, there are concerns over the high cost of building and maintaining
drones, but UVL Robotics estimates that the cost of drone deliveries would be
far lower than with human deliveries, both economically and environmentally.

Since 2022, UVL Robotics has been partnering with Talabat to deliver food in
Muscat. The price per delivery is one Omani Rial ($2.60). In its broader
delivery plan, including parcels, they are making sure that the delivery fee for
3 kg of food or a parcel of groceries is lower than $5.20. It doesn’t sound
cheap but take into consideration Oman’s mountainous terrains and the time cost
for human couriers. Delivering meals from the city to Muscat Bay, surrounded by
the sea and mountains, would generally take anywhere between 30 to 60 minutes
with a human courier. With drones, it’s only around 15 minutes. Courier
deliveries made using diesel-consuming light commercial vehicles (LCVs) like the
motorcycles commonly used by delivery companies have a daily limit of around 20
orders. Drones can take over 30. Currently, these delivery drones are making
around 10 deliveries per day. “Our target is at least 3,000 deliveries per day,”
Grankin says confidently, though he does not specify a deadline by which he
wants to achieve this target.

A report by the World Economic Forum estimates that last-mile delivery will see
78 percent growth by 2030 because of the booming e-commerce sector. However,
this increase could also lead to an increase of over 30 percent in carbon
emissions from delivery traffic across the 100 largest cities worldwide.



 * 
   



Sustainability is a global subject, and it’s no exception for the Middle East. A
statement from the Ministry of Climate Change and Environment in 2022 announced
that the UAE government aimed to cut carbon emissions by 31 percent by 2030.
Saudi Arabia’s Saudi Green Initiatives (SGI) also aims to reduce carbon
emissions by 278 mtpa (million tons per annum). Grankin sees drones as one of
the most effective means to contribute to a greener economy. Research conducted
by UVL found that simply eliminating vehicles idling while loading and unloading
parcels could lead to a 30 to 50 percent reduction in relevant CO₂ emissions.
Beyond that, the CO₂ emissions of delivery drones are at least 36 percent lower
than LCVs.

When asked about his hopes for the future, Grankin says that drone deliveries
should be a crucial part of the smart cities. At King Abdullah University of
Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, UVL Robotics is launching smart
loading and landing stations across the campus—a large area of 35 square
kilometers. “It shows the potential of what a smart city could look like,”
Grankin says. KAUST has also introduced other cutting-edge technologies like
self-driving vehicles for both delivery and transportation, and smart homes to
its campus. The potential for smart cities should take flight now, according to
Grankin, and the introduction of larger-scale commercial drone coverage in the
region could provide a highly mobile reference for other parts of the world. 



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by Yunqi Li

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👉  And be sure to follow WIRED Middle East on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn

 

 




 


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