Why did We Hear 5 Years Ago That Online Orders Would Be Delivered By Drone, And This Is Nowhere Near Happening Yet?
In: Economics
I suspect that this focus has remained in the military arena. Using small drones to carry important payloads is of utmost importance for the military. Probably already happening but they don’t want to use it in commercial applications where it can be quickly purchased and repurposed back for military surveillance and such by countries we don’t want such technology being used against us or our allies.
Same reason we aren’t all using 3D TVs or curved screens, priorities (and real world effectiveness) changes
FWIW, I got Starbucks “delivered” via drone once here in North Carolina. In actuality, someone manually commanded the drone from the launch point and mid-flight passed controls to the employee at my location for the delivery portion. As others have said, regulations are too archaic to handle this tech right now but they were working with FAA doing proof of concept type stuff.
It was honestly pretty cool even if it seemed absolutely ridiculous.
One thing that wasn’t probably thought of right away was with the explosion (ha) of drone usage there is also many ways to take the drone down and steal the product
they’re way too busy teaching machines how to make art and music instead. seriously the most depressing development in our lifetime
A lot of that stuff is just Amazon bluffing the b&m retailers into stifling their own innovation to “see how things go” with the Amazon trial. And I have seen it work first hand, really impeccable use of a $40k promotional video from Amazon’s marketing team.
The college I attended a few months ago had little driving robots that were trained to deliver food from on-campus restaurants to the dorms.
Drone deliveries are happening in Africa (for emergency medical stuff). The company tried to bring it to the US, they have a test program going on in NC or SC (I don’t remember which.)
The problem they are having is that in Africa, every plane is tracked no matter the size, so the computer on the drone can avoid them. In the USA, the FAA is unable to force small plane owners to instal tracking systems.
The company’s test program in the Carolinas, they were force to higher ground spotters who’s job is to track small planes and report their positions to help keep the drones from colliding into them.
There are some deliveries made by drone. The biggest success is in Africa where they make sense for high value medical deliveries.
Zipline Logistics which is based in California but which operates primarily in Africa is one of the companies doing it.
(Work on drone stuff for the government)
There are a lot of regulatory and safety issues to overcome. The technology has the *potential* to satisfy the issues but it’s expensive and a lot of work, and it’s not 100% clear the costs will be worth the profits, yet.
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