From groceries at your home to demining: the latest gadgets at the drone fair

And drones will soon not only be found in the air: in the countryside, in the Westhoek for example, unmanned carts will soon be driving with the groceries to your home.

Not just in the air

When you think of drones, you almost automatically look in the air, but they also do their job on the road or under water.

Sven Nachtergaele of POM West-Vlaanderen: “When I talk about drones, I am actually talking about unmanned vehicles and unmanned vessels. In other words, everywhere where there is no person at the wheel.”

With the North Sea, we therefore have an extra asset in our province. This way they can immediately test the brand new demining drone of the Ostend company Exail in the sea.

Brecht Govaerts of Exail: “It will actually sail to the mine and once it arrives at the mine, it will start filming again with the camera at the front to see whether it is actually a dangerous mine. And if we detect that in our mothership on the images, this drone will actually explode by itself.”

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Drone shopping

And Colruyt is also looking at our province. With self-driving carts, they will soon bring groceries to the front door of the customers.

“We actually also want to go to less urban areas,” says Gregory Pinte of Colruyt Group. “And those autonomous vehicles are actually very suitable for that, such as here in West Flanders.”

For security

Although not every delivery via drones is completely kosher.

Stijn Willekens of Active Drone Security Solutions: “Think of prisons, for example, of drones that really don’t belong there for the delivery of all kinds of bizarre parcels or mobile phones. We are going to detect them in the first instance, we are going to identify them in the second instance. that makes it easier for police services in particular to arrest those drones and especially the pilots.”

So there is no shortage of applications. Although there is still room for improvement, especially when it comes to transporting people. Who knows, we might even make a trip with a drone soon.