At this year’s ITS World Congress, Volocopter, a pioneer in urban air mobility (UAM), is presenting its electric heavy-lift cargo drone, VoloDrone, at its booth in Hall B2. The VoloDrone is an uncrewed, fully electric utility drone capable of carrying an impressive and unprecedented payload. This electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft has been designed to serve challenging missions across diverse industries, ready to be deployed where classic transport reaches its limits.
In commercial operation, the VoloDrone will be able to cover distances of up to 40km. The drone is 9.15m in diameter x 2.15m tall, and weighs 600kg with an additional payload of up to 200kg. Future VoloDrone operations will be fully electric with autonomous beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) capabilities. The VoloDrone’s first flight took place in 2019. Since then, regular flight tests have been conducted at various airfields in southern Germany.
Volocopter is building the world’s first sustainable and scalable urban air mobility business to bring affordable air taxi services to megacities worldwide. The company’s family of aircraft for UAM services include the VoloCity air taxi for short intracity passenger routes, the VoloDrone for heavy-lift goods transport, and the VoloConnect for longer passenger routes between suburban communities and downtown.
The company is also developing physical and digital infrastructures (VoloPort and VoloIQ) to complement this robust, multipurpose aircraft portfolio and create scalable urban air mobility ecosystems in cities.
In 2011, Volocopter performed the first-ever crewed flight of a purely electric multicopter and has since showcased numerous public flights with its full-scale aircraft. The most notable have been the public test flights at Singapore’s Marina Bay in October 2019 and the world’s first autonomous eVTOL flight in Dubai 2017.
