Air New Zealand gets robot-tethered drone in Spark private 5G warehouse project

Some complex airline problems might be solved with another type of aircraft now operating in an Auckland warehouse.

Air New Zealand has teamed up with Spark, Ericsson and Canadian firm Cypher Robotics to deploy a robot-tethered drone.

The airline and the telco said they worked together to create New Zealand’s first private 5G network for business.

The size, height and complexity of the 5000sq m logistics warehouse has presented challenges to older forms of technology.

The drone carried out stocktakes in the building at Auckland Airport.

And instead of a laborious annual stocktake, the firms said the drone and robot could perform more frequent assessments.

“We are an industry that’s really struggling to get back on our feet post-Covid,” Air New Zealand chief digital officer Nikhil Ravishankar said.

“And one of the challenges is really how we manage our supply chain end to end.”

That included how parts were imported, then deployed to the right engineers at the right time.

A better supply chain system could make the difference between flights departing on time or being delayed, Ravishankar said.

He said the airline received millions of parts, and goods from suppliers all around the world.

Ravishankar said the robot-tethered drone also helped with productivity and safety, reducing risks of working at heights.

Some of the parts are on shelves 15m high.

Mark Beder, Spark New Zealand customer director for enterprise and government, said private 5G networks might be useful for a variety of businesses.

Beder said ports and factories might be future customers.

“It’s really exciting to have the first one under way and it really is a good test for us to really figure out how we can also solve different types of problems.”

The drone hovering in the airline's logistics warehouse.

The companies said rather than taking jobs from humans, the robot and drone carried out some tasks least popular with staff.

“This warehouse is a very complex radio environment,” said Ian Ross, Ericsson’s head of enterprise for private networks.

“Wi-Fi has struggles providing a good signal quality in the depths of the aisles, particularly with the height of the racks, where we find 5G is optimised for this type of environment.”

Cypher Robotics founder and CEO Peter King from Canada had been working with drones for about 15 years.

King said he still got excited every time a new project took off.

“We’re actually seeing New Zealand as one of our bigger potential markets right now, mainly because of those partnerships that we’ve been able to establish here.”

The drone on trial was carrying out stock takes about once every 10 days.

Spark, One NZ and 2degrees will all shut down their old 3G networks by the end of the year.