Skip to main content

Boeing’s beast of a drone can carry up to 500 pounds of cargo

Future of autonomous air travel: Boeing unveils new cargo air vehicle prototype
Perhaps the only surprising thing about Boeing’s remotely controlled octocopter is that it’s taken it this long to make one.

The aerospace company unveiled this meaty flying machine on January 10 and claims it has the potential to transform the way we carry heavy payloads over relatively short distances.

Described by Boeing as an “unmanned electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing (eVTOL) cargo air vehicle (CAV) prototype,” the octocopter took just three months to build and measures 4.57 meters by 5.49 meters. It weighs more than 700 pounds and can carry payloads of up to 500 pounds. To give that a bit of context, the much, much smaller Phantom 4 consumer drone made by DJI can hardly manage 2 pounds. Yes, Boeing’s creation is a beast.

The company’s chief technology officer, Greg Hyslop, said the new air vehicle represents “another major step in our Boeing eVTOL strategy,” adding, “We have an opportunity to really change air travel and transport, and we’ll look back on this day as a major step in that journey.”

A short video (above) posted by Boeing this week shows the hefty machine lifted into the air by its eight counter-rotating sets of blades. But the enormous scale of the design is only apparent in the few brief shots in which you can see some of the team standing right by it.

“It’s fully electric on some Boeing custom-designed batteries,” says David Neely of Boeing Research and Technology. “The goal is to extend into a large-scale cargo platform; if you extend the range and extend the payload a little bit [we can] deliver 250 to 500 pounds over a 10 or 20 mile radius [and] change the way we deliver goods.”

The unveiling comes just months after Boeing acquired Aurora Flight Sciences, a world-class developer and manufacturer of advanced automated drones and aerospace platforms. Hyslop said at the time that the two companies would work together to “advance the development of autonomy for our commercial and military systems [and] open new markets with transformational technologies.”

One thing springs to mind with Boeing’s beast. If Amazon gets wind of the technology, it may be keen to incorporate it into its own Prime Air drone, paving the way for flying televisions and other heavy goods for delivery to customers.

But of course, for drone delivery platforms of all shapes and sizes, strict regulatory hurdles still need to be overcome before they can go into operation.

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more