Bell

Hit the skies flying.

My first day at Bell, I was quickly introduced to the team and my boss said “Hey, so your first task is to write an auto-takeoff and auto-land sequence for this drone we’re building.” It was the start of an awesome project that we ultimately ended up showing off at CES 2020.

CES 2020:

At CES 2020 Bell brought with us a concept for the city of the future. One where our air taxi, the Nexus and our autonomous pod transport coexist within an urban ecosystem to move people, goods, and data around the environment. My team was tasked with designing, building, and flying the small scale Nexus drones found in the virtual city behind the mockup of the real thing.

With the goal of flying two fleets of drones at CES for the entirety of the event, we knew these things had to be able to fly themselves. It wouldn’t be practical to have six people flying drones at the event, and not to mention way less cool. We planned to show off to the world our new cloud offering, AerOS, and demonstrate how fleets of vehicles could be managed. This was no small undertaking and we spent every day since I began in July until opening day of CES building and refining the drone platform.

After the many long nights leading up to CES, it was finally time to show off what we’d been working on. We flew the drones autonomously for 8 hours a day, for four days straight. During the event, we racked up 3,980 flights, 33.07 flight hours, and 471 battery changes across our collection of 6 drones.

See some of the show highlights over on YouTube: