Case study: Delivery UAVs

Extending delivery missions and saving space for greater payloads

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Customer’s challenge

Delivery UAVs must safely and securely deliver goods to their intended recipients wherever they are located. The longer the range and ability to handle heavier and larger loads, the more productive these UAVs can be. Because they can operate in congested and complex areas, they must be absolutely safe. They need to incorporate redundancies on multiple layers to avoid harming people, damaging property, or losing their valuable cargo. That means motors, GPS for navigation, vision systems, and other sensors for flight and flight termination require redundant power with incurring significant weight gain. The key goals were:

Increase flight time to reach greater distances
Compact and lightweight solution to carry heavier loads
Supporting a variety of point-of-load voltages

The Vicor solution

Weight is a critical factor for delivery drones. They must maintain a low overall weight in order to increase their payload capacity and fly smoothly to the destination without over stressing the battery. Vicor high power density modules help to reduce the weight of the drone and save on-board space for the sensors needed for safe and effective operation.

Key benefits

High-power density enables smaller form factor and lower weight

Higher efficiency to extend flight times and range of operation

Compact Vicor regulators enable redundancy when duplicated at the point of loads

Power delivery network

Power dense and lightweight ZVS Buck and Buck-Boost products are ideally suited to enable delivery UAVs to extend their flight times without taking up valuable payload space and weight. PI33xx ZVS buck and PI37xx ZVS buck-boost products are so dense that designers can include multiple point-of-load converters to save on cabling while powering multiple devices with multiple power buses to create the redundancy needed to ensure safe and reliable delivery operations.