Patent Licensing Insights: Insights on Flirtey’s Newly Issued Patent on Drone Delivery

BOS Insights is a section featuring insights/trends from our in-house tool BOS, which can help you in designing and picking appropriate patent monetization and acquisition strategies. 

Short for Business Opportunity for Sales, the BOS tool:

• Can help find prospects that would be willing to in-license or purchase your patents;
• Make your monetization campaign plain sailing; and
• Find patents that have received a rejection (102/103 type) due to one of your patents and more. 

Onto the insight part now, shall we?

Flirtey (a drone delivery service) was recently issued a US patent US10112721B2 on safety in drone flights and deliveries. US’721 discloses a technique for landing a UAV, such as a drone, using a parachute.

It would be interesting to note whether other drone manufacturers or drone delivery services adopt these safety features or not.

Something that our BOS tool can tell right now –

When we inputted this asset in our BOS tool, it indicated that another company Flytrex was trying to patent something similar in its patent application US20180065745A1.

US Appl. 745 seems to discuss a protection system for a UAV/drone that can deploy a parachute to slow the speed of the fall of the UAV/drone. But now this application seems to have been abandoned.

Also, Flytrex seems to be highlighting that they use some kind of safety mechanism for their drones.

Safety: Our drones include extensive features to ensure safety. This includes hardware redundancies on multiple layers: motors, navigation, an autonomous parachute and a flight termination system. We’ve successfully conducted thousands of flights and are committed to the highest general aviation maintenance standards. In addition, our system uses the unique landscape of suburbs to plan safe routes that avoid flight over people.

Source: https://flytrex.com/

A quick search on Google patents led me to US6471160B2 – a granted US patent that seems to focus on deploying a parachute on a drone. And it was filed by Airbus.

Are there more such patents (like US6471160B2) out there that also focus on Drone safety? Or will Flirtey emerge as the pioneer in drone safety mechanism with its granted patent?

You can choose to either wait and watch or get in touch with us for more details. And do try out BOS for your patent to discover interesting revenue-generating insights.

Authored by: Rohit Sood, Infringement.