Farm to Table Restaurant Delivery via Drone

Drone Delivery in Maui for Mill House Restaurant

12/3/2015

Maui Farm to Table via drone - Drone to Table

Where it's being done
There is a really cool place in Maui called the Maui Tropical Plantation. All around the Maui Tropical Plantation are organic fields that provide fresh fruit and vegetables to a restaurant called The Mill House (located at the heart of the Maui Tropical Plantation). They wanted to see if they could rig up a drone to deliver produce directly from the fields to the chef at Mill House, and they needed my help!

See more about Drone to Table

Drone Delivery
Drone delivery and transport has become a pretty big topic after Amazon announced they were going to explore using drones for delivery but if you follow this blog you know I have been thinking about using drones for more than just pictures for awhile.

My friend Chris over at Hawaii Web Group asked me if I could help figure out how to pull this off and of course I said yes! There are a ton of different options for heavy lift drones, but I used to own an S800, so my first recommendation was the spreading wings series from DJI. My S800 was a remarkable machine and I thought it was really easy to setup at the time compared to the do-it-yourself machines I was used to hacking together. Fast forward a few years and I realize how spoiled I have become with the Inspire and Phantoms.

DJI S900
I learned a few things about the S900 and A2 flight controller that anyone who is considering a DJI heavy lift copter should know. First of all, the A2 has a built in receiver and you really should stick to a Futaba radio that will bind directly too it. For some reason, we ended up with a Futaba 10J and it is not a good choice because it would require a separate s.bus adapter. Why would you even want to consider this as an option? Just get a Futaba with FAAST. I ended up lending my Futaba T8FG to the project. It binded directly to the A2 and we just sent the 10J back.

Another interesting thing about the S900 is the connectors that they decided to use for the battery connection. We were flying 12000mah 6 cell batteries and needed to solder plugs on each one. This would not be that big of a deal except that the positive and ground plugs are two different types - AS150 and XT150 Here is a link to order matching sets of these different plugs. Save yourself some trouble and get a soldering station because these have really thick gauge wire.

How much weight can it handle?
As far as the lifting capacity of the S900, I would say a 7 pound payload is a good safe number. It can lift more but when I tried to lift off with 9 pounds in the wind it felt like it could tip. I never tested the flight time of the 12000mah under load but it could probably fly for at least 6-7 minutes safely and possibly more. I never did a proper test so I used my battery voltage checker to monitor the voltage between flights to make sure we would not be losing any precious veggies in a drone crash.

Farm to Table via Drone Delivery
This project was an experiment to see if drone to table might be a viable concept and I think it could with more development. The S900 is not a simple rig to operate and maintain and when they start doing this regularly, I will need to train someone to operate and maintain the drone. DJI has still not standardized larger batteries for their larger drones so you have to be careful and take your time loading batteries. I nearly crashed my s800 into a pond because of the battery attachment method on the S800 and it is basically the same on the s900. It's a challenging drone to operate even with the stable A2 flight controller - bigger drones are just more stressful.

Automation will be the final solution, which is why a dedicated landing pad and take off zone at the restaurant and at the farm have been created. It is always windy on Maui, and that decreases the precision of the GPS holding of the flight controller, so you would need to have a larger space to take off and land from (or have someone who has some hours on the drone sticks.) I still have not experimented with automation so I do not know its limitations and draw backs.

FINAL THOUGHTS
This was a fun project, and I felt lucky to be able to work on something like this. Exploring the uses of drones has always been one of the reasons I started this website, and this was the most unique thing I've done yet. Now we can all add "Drone to table" to the things drones are good for!