There's a lot of debate around the economic suitability of drones for the delivery of the goods as a direct competitor to traditional trucks and delivery vans. There's an article written by Flexport which highlights two crucial factors that makes drones delivery of general goods not feasible, even in the near future: (1) route density and (2) drop size. Route density is the number of drop-offs you can make on a delivery route and drop-size is the number of parcels per stop on that delivery route. Given the strict airspace regulations on drone size and weight, it has become quite evident, particularly in the African context, that the delivery of general goods will not be an economically viable option even though the obvious need might say otherwise.  However, further analysis and demonstration have shown, from companies like Matternet and others, that the transport of the time-sensitive and high-value parcels (legal-documents, medicine samples, high-value spices...

As a student completing my final year, I vividly remember the insatiable desire to just complete the degree, graduate and kiss university life goodbye! Even though I actually enjoyed my course and the fact this had been my dream since my second year of high school, I felt I had enough. At that point, the thought of pursuing a postgraduate degree was the further thing from my mind. Such psychological damage was based on the opinions (albeit biased) that academics, the professors and full-time researchers that taught us, seemed detached from reality and their expectations from the feeble and vulnerable students, were beyond unreasonable. I vividly remember the insatiable desire to just complete my course, graduate and kiss university life goodbye! Even though I saw myself pursuing a postgraduate degree, the notion of having to face the same ordeal of my last few months as an undergraduate, was enough to convince me otherwise. I just didn't see myself having to deal with t...

The objective for this milestone was to integrate the same model functionality developed and analyzed within the Matlab/Simulink environment into a mature environment that will be able to test most functionalities of the Flight controller software that will be flashed for real-flight testing. The decision was to either migrate the Ardupilot (in this case ArduCopter ) software into the Matlab environment or integrate the highly nonlinear quadcopter model with flapping dynamics into the Ardupilot environment. The former option would mean no easy integration with Mission Planner and the real-time sofware-in-the-loop ( SITL ) testing tool (which also includes the infrastructure to communicate with the Flightgear 3D visualization environemt, while the later with make use of singular environment although the software development effort would quite tedious and error-prone. It was chosen to go with the first option as this was thought to be lead to more mature verification method prior...