Future-proof drone delivery and navigation

Executive summary

Goals: Deliver innovations in the drone sector

Solution: Software solutions for drone flight and delivery services

Services delivered: Back-engineered drone traffic map and built drone e-commerce portal

Client background

Our client is a US-based drone technology company that builds integrated platforms connecting systems across air, land, and sea. Its current business scope includes delivering solutions for border observation, emergency response, oversight of various environments, medical supply and sensitive cargo delivery, and crowd monitoring.

Business challenge

Previously, the organization’s business model had a focus on drone flight and delivery services, and it collaborated with Tietoevry Create as part of these initiatives.

The client engaged us to reverse-engineer a drone traffic management app they had recently acquired before integrating it with its own product. Back engineering was needed as most of the experts who had originally worked on the system were no longer part of the company.

Afterwards, our partnership continued in another project — a drone delivery app. The client sought external expertise to support its internal team of global engineers that worked on an e-commerce portal handling grocery delivery by drones. The company operated physical locations where the drones were loaded and dispatched, and the software was responsible for managing the order and delivery process.

Solution & business value

In the first project, we reverse-engineered an application that allowed drone operators to integrate drones into national airspace systems, mainly in the US. It provided real-time maps of airspace rules, restrictions, and no-fly zones for drone pilots and enabled them to get near-instant flight authorization from controlling authorities. Our client had taken over the solution in an acquisition and needed to back-engineer it to integrate it with its own system. However, the company ultimately chose to shut down the app due to unforeseen complexities.

After the sunset of the system, our engineers joined the team that was building another product from the client’s own portfolio — a drone delivery platform that:

• Managed customer orders for products from one of the largest US retailers and the client's own online store
• Validated drone flight paths
• Assessed weather conditions
• Integrated with external systems, planning routes, and providing telemetry
• Managed hub locations
• Kept a drone inventory

Our team worked on the back-end and implemented DevOps workflows. We applied our expertise:

• Working on legacy systems with certain limitations that our team had to find workarounds for
• Suggesting more appropriate technologies to deal with the limitations
• Taking part in multiple emergency sessions for live troubleshooting and the quick resolution of problems in production that paused the services in peak times

Technologies & tools

In the two projects, we used the following technologies:

• Languages: Golang, Typescript, JavaScript, Python, Node.js
• Cloud services: AWS, Azure, GCS, GKE, AWS Lambda, Cloud SQL, Cloud Run functions
• Databases: Postgres, Firestore, MongoDB

We also used LaunchDarkly for feature flags, OpenTelemetry with Honeycomb for observability, and Frontegg for authentication.