Drones in Logistics

Supply Chain Café by PICS Belgium supported by ABCAL 27/03/2025
Speaker: Grégoire Moreau, Co-founder & CTO of ADLC

From novelty to reality

Originally presented to the world by Amazon who announced in 2013 that soon packages would be flown to customers’ doors, the use of drones for transport faced initial high obstacles:

• Aerial drones must integrate into airspaces which had no rules or systems for unmanned aircrafts;
• Customers were not willing to pay the higher costs of this new technology.

Early breakthroughs were largely limited to specialized cases, such as Zipline’s long-range medical deliveries in Africa.

In recent years, developments in European regulatory frameworks and unmanned traffic management systems have paved the way for practical drone logistics solutions to emerge.

Samplifly

A striking example is the Samplifly pilot project between start-up ADLC and the multinational SGS. Within petrochemical operations, ships at the quay frequently await sample analyses before proceeding, leading to delays. By deploying drones to deliver samples directly to the laboratory, ADLC significantly reduces transport times. After a successful project finalised in June 2024, ADLC now offers a daily transport of samples for SGS in the Port of Antwerp.

Key enablers for drone logistics

When building a solution for a drone logistics use case, three critical factors come into play:

1. Technical – How heavy is the payload, and which drone configuration is suitable?
2. Regulatory – What are the population density, airspace constraints, and risk mitigations that will define the possibility and complexity of the authorisation process ?
3. Operational – How will drones be integrated into existing processes ?

Cost-effectiveness for the drone operator to provide this solution versus the value proposition for the client determines the viability of a drone logistics use case.

Future outlook

Many trends are converging to enable a larger amount of drone logistics use cases.

• Regulatory harmonization: Rules across the world and Europe are converging, enabling rapid scaling up of working solutions.
• Aircraft standardization: Standards and certification processes are being established, enabling more competition on aircraft performance and a reduction of prices.
• Automation: Ground software systems are becoming more automated, shifting the role of the pilot to a real machine operator and enabling him to potentially monitor several simultaneous operations.

Taking into account these advances, aerial drones will remain most advantageous in scenarios that replace high-cost vehicles or serve time-critical shipments that cannot wait for conventional bulk transport. Nonetheless, as the drone ecosystem matures, it promises a strategic shift in supply chain design, accelerating deliveries and opening new avenues for agile logistics.