Ribbit has identified 120 remote communities across Northern Canada that could benefit from increased air cargo access.
Credit: Ribbit
Northern Canada is one of the most remote regions on Earth, with sparsely populated communities spread across a vast territory, lacking year-round road access and completely dependent on air cargo for essential deliveries.
Ribbit is a Toronto-based startup that is using autonomy to help improve air cargo access to those far-flung communities, applying its autonomous software solution to ultralight aircraft in hopes that removing the pilot from the cockpit will lower operating costs enough to justify increased deliveries of foods, medicine and other essential goods to underserved regions.
“Our whole hypothesis is that, if you can take a small airplane where pilots represent a higher fraction of operating costs and volume inside the plane—and remove those operating constraints—you can end up creating a really high-frequency, reliable and cost-effective network to serve some of these challenging remote areas,” explains Ribbit co-founder Jeremy Wang. “If we can do this right in these remote locations, then hopefully we can scale up to other markets where this would be beneficial.”
The company has been trialing its autonomous system on a modified ultralight two-passenger aircraft with the seats removed to make room for cargo deliveries. Since receiving a special operations flight certificate in 2022 from Transport Canada that authorized uncrewed test flights, the startup says it has completed more than 200 hr. of “hands-free” flights.
More recently, the Canadian regulator awarded Ribbit a C$1.3 million ($980,000) contract to conduct a yearlong demonstration of a self-flying aircraft on autonomous cargo flights in Northern Canada. As part of that effort, Wang said the company has identified potential commercial routes for flight testing and enlisted numerous retailers and wholesalers across the region to assist with deliveries of perishable foods to remote areas.
“We’re talking very low population densities, communities that have no year-round road access and are served either by aircraft, ice boats or barges,” Wang says. “There are about 120 destinations we’ve identified across Northern Canada that fit that criteria.”
While the autonomy system being developed by Ribbit handles all phases of flight from taxi to takeoff, cruise and landing, the startup is still including a safety pilot in the cockpit during the flight tests, mainly serving in a supervisory role, according to Wang. The company is also using a remote pilot in a ground control station who is primarily charged with communicating with air traffic control on behalf of the aircraft, although the remote pilot could potentially intervene manually in certain rare scenarios.
Eventually, Ribbit plans to remove the safety pilot and increase the ratio of remote pilots to aircraft from 1:1 to 1:2 or even 1:3, Wang says.
While Ribbit envisions scaling up to larger aircraft–and eventually transitioning to other applications like e-commerce and express cargo–Wang said that initially operating smaller aircraft over low-density regions will help build trust in the safety of uncrewed cargo flights.
“We think it makes sense to begin with smaller GA [general aviation] planes operating in remote areas with a safety pilot on board and gradually removing that safety pilot as well as increasing the complexity of the airspace out of which we’re operating and working our way up in terms of population and air traffic density,” Wang says.
But for now, Wang says Ribbit remains focused on its core mission of connecting remote areas.
“Our stance is that there is a whole bunch of latent potential in rural and remote areas that can be enabled with better transportation,” Wang says. “In Canada, for instance, remote areas already support around 30% of GDP, but maybe with better transportation we can increase that number.”
Besides Ribbit, there are a number of other startups that are similarly pursuing autonomous retrofits of GA aircraft. Boston-based Merlin recently completed a series of autonomous flight trials in Alaska using a Cessna Caravan fitted with its automated flight control system. And California-based Reliable Robotics has been making progress in developing and testing its continuous autopilot system as a retrofit for the Caravan, including through partnerships with the U.S. Air Force.
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