The challenge
Swoop Aero fly autonomous drones that deliver medical supplies into remote areas. Their battery packs do double duty: as well as powering the aircraft, they hold the flight data recorded in the air. Every charge cycle is therefore also a data offload, and the ground equipment has to handle both as one operation.
Tekt was engaged to build the smart charging unit that does both, for use in the same remote places the aircraft fly into. A unit sitting hours from support cannot be allowed to fail outright, and a flight record cannot be allowed to strand itself on a battery.
The work
Two channels and a mechanical interlock
The charger is built around a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. It presents two independent battery channels with two charging ports, so a single channel failure does not take the unit out of service, along with the intelligence to detect the dual battery power delivery state. An automated mechanical interlock, driven by dual servo drivers, clamps the battery onto the charger. Charge initiation is not a matter of applying voltage: it runs through a digital data exchange with the pack's own battery management system.
Getting the flight data home
Flight data offloads over a USB bus presented from inside the battery pack to the CM4, is written to an integrated SSD, and is then backhauled to central servers in the AWS cloud. Wired LAN is the primary path and Wi-Fi the secondary, because these units sit in remote locations where neither can be assumed on its own.
Manufacture and handover
Seventy-five chargers in total, across five configurations over three generations, built under aerospace-level quality control and configuration management.
The manufacturing data pack was handed over during the engagement, as standard practice here. It was handed over a second time after the client's transition to Kite Aero, so the new owner could keep manufacturing.
About the client
Swoop Aero built a drone logistics capability for medical delivery into remote and hard-to-reach places. The business now operates as Kite Aero, and continues to deliver autonomous drone services in several countries, building its corpus of recorded CASA-approved BVLOS — beyond visual line of sight — flight trials toward extended-range automated fleet operation in global markets.
