After performing the first commercial drone delivery flight using its patented Rapid Delivery System (RDS1) earlier this year, A2Z saw an opportunity to build a drone to enable drone deliveries at scale while minimizing delivery time on-station. The recently launched, ready-to-fly commercial drone delivery platform, RDSX, will help drone service providers streamline deliveries while mitigating consumer concerns with residential drone delivery.

By being able to keep a delivery drone away from people and property, it helps to mitigate consumer concerns with drone deliveries such as the potential for property damage, intrusive rotor noise, and assuages some of the privacy concerns with low-flying unmanned aerial vehicles.

"We're very proud to be consumer focused, even though our customers are service providers, the real end user is someone who doesn't want a drone in their yard, someone who doesn't want parachutes down tumbling onto their property," Evan Hertafeld Co-Founder of A2Z, told Commercial UAV News. "We think that we have the right solution, both from the operator side and from that front end in terms of optics and doing the right thing by the consumer industry, which is under a lot of scrutiny."

Instead of landing or hovering close to the ground to deliver an item, A2Z’s RDS1 allows drones to maintain an altitude as high as 150 feet throughout the delivery, enabling them to deposit payloads into areas congested by trees, wires, or other dangerous obstructions. By performing a controlled-freefall with the help of its Kevlar tether and auto-release mechanism, drones can make efficient and accurate deliveries, while safeguarding the package recipients on the ground as well as the onboard payload during flight.

Ideal for a wide range of applications, including shore-to-ship port delivery, life-saving medicine, search-and-rescue professionals quickly deploying equipment to remote areas, or for rapidly collecting samples throughout an expansive mining facility, the new drone, RDSX, is ready to navigate beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS). It can operate in diverse conditions including temperatures ranging from -20 to 45 Celsius, in up to 95% humidity, and from elevations up to 4,800 feet.

What makes the RDSX unique when compared to other products in the market, is its capacity to accommodate dual A2Z Drone Delivery RDS1 tethered freefall delivery devices for multi-package missions or a single tethered configuration to expand range when needed. This means the drone can carry dual payloads up to two kilograms each on a round trip of up to 18 kilometers, or up to 30 kilometers if configured with a single tether.

To make sure missions run without accidents, the drone integrates redundant safety measures, including an onboard parachute in case of complete power failure, emergency payload abandonment to quickly detach the payload from the drone amid flight emergencies, manual delivery control to manually control tethered payload delivery and retrieval, and more. The RDSX comes equipped with robust, lightweight, and low-cost payload delivery boxes, two sets of easily swappable bucket-style batteries, a ground control station, a flight case to transport the drone and accessories, extendable radio signal range, and an optional open-source flight controller, as well as optional continuous-charging battery dock capable of batch-charging four batteries simultaneously.