BT Group’s Digital Incubation Team is entering into a deal with Drone safety specialist Altitude Angel with the aim of making a drone superhighway in the UK.
The £5m investment will create a unified traffic management system (UTM) known as ARROW. A UTM is the software platform and core infrastructure that is needed to allow drones to operate safely over large distances.
Altitude Angel’s ARROW technology detects and identifies drones and also enables drones to share the airspace with crewed aviation safely and securely.
Richard Parker, CEO and founder, Altitude Angel comments, “With BT Group, Altitude Angel has a partner which shares its ambition to make automated commercial drone operations at scale in the UK a day-to-day reality. Combining our ARROW technology, which allows crewed and uncrewed aircraft to share the same skies, safely and securely, with BT Group’s significant communications infrastructure, we can quickly bring ARROW to the masses. This will provide the UK with the first nationwide drone superhighways, unlocking the potential of this new and innovative technology and revolutionising business operations in countless industries.”
Tom Guy, Managing Director, Etc. – BT Group said, “At Etc., we support businesses like Altitude Angel, who have game changing ideas that benefit from BT Group’s scale and our agile approach to growth. This partnership is a natural extension to BT Group’s work building the leading network in the UK, supporting the UTM industry that sits adjacent to our core business.”
Altitude Angel is planning up to a thousand miles of Drone super highway which will connect towns and cities across the UK with an initial 165 mile section connecting airspace above Reading, Oxford, Milton Keynes, Cambridge, Coventry, and Rugby.
