We hear a lot about drones nowadays, but actually, drones already started to become popular in the 1940s when the US army contracted Reginald Denny’s company, which produced radio controlled airplanes, to supply them with equipment for target practice. Now, in 2017 we see them across all business sectors such as agriculture, the military, infrastructure etc., but how likely is it that the sky will be full of drones within a few years?
For answering this question it is interesting to look at Amazon, who want to implement drones into the delivery process. When the predictions of Bezos, CEO of Amazon, will become reality, drones can actually take over the delivery industry, but there are some remarks on his predictions. Bezos introduced the drone delivery plan in a 60-minute video, and in this video, he points out that a drone can operate autonomously. He also explained that regarding the process right now, there will not yet be any new jobs at Amazon because installing the navigation points in the drone will be automatic and the package will be placed on the drone automatically (Bezos, 2013). This would mean that the only change in the organizational structure would be that all the truck drivers would not have a job anymore.
However, one remark is that drones can only carry packages under 5 pounds. If this will be the case, the truck drivers will not completely become obsolete. This will still be needed when drones deliver the packages. Another problem is the battery life of a drone. As stated by an employee of Amazon, the battery life of a drone is 30 minutes and weather conditions could even make this shorter (Gross, 2013). Regarding the fact that Amazon promises to deliver within 30 minutes, right now this would mean that the drone would not even have battery to fly back to the warehouse, and this does not even take into account that in extreme weather the drone is not capable of flying at all (Gross, 2013). Another problem regarding battery life is that a drone could only deliver within a range of 10 miles. It would take a very long time to realize the goal of using drone delivery world wide because there would more warehouses would need to be built, or large improvements would need to be made to battery life.
Maybe drones will someday take over the world, but for now I think we can conclude that drones have disrupted the agriculture industry and the military, but that they are not disrupting every industry as fast as we think they are.
Gross, D. (2013). Amazon’s drone delivery: How would it work? CNN. Cable News Network, 2.
Bezos, J. (2013, December 1). Amazon’s Jeff Bezos looks to the future. (C. Rose, Interviewer)
Hi Lisa,
I think your post looks very interesting. Indeed, battery life and capacity are two major factors that might limit the practicability of using drone. However, a possible solution is to combine trucks and drones. In other words, the truck will drive in the cities with drones “sitting” on it, allowing trucks and drones to deliver packages simultaneously. While trucks can deliver packages to those destinations that are close to main roads, drones can carry packages to residential area with narrow roads or city center with few parking spots. In this way, the problem of drone’s short battery life might be solved by letting drones to charge constantly every time when they fly back to trucks. Since drones do not have to serve every customer, they can always get charged whenever they are waiting on trucks.
This delivery method involves in some complicated mathematical models. In general, a traveling salesman problem with some specific constraints need to be solved. For more details on the models and solutions, please refer to https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2639672.
Although this method is able to compensate drone’s short battery life, it still can’t deal with drone’s low capacity. This means only small and light packages can be delivered by drones. However, I still believe we can expect drone delivery coming into our life in a few years. At that time, don’t feel shocked if you were woken up by a drone on Saturday morning : )
Yanfeng
Hi Lisa, I think you raised a very interesting question here. Drones are becoming more and more advanced, and I personally think drones can disrupt a lot of industries. In a lot of industries companies are already experimenting with drones. I found this cool article in which they give a lot of examples for which purposes drones can be used: (https://www.techworld.com/picture-gallery/apps-wearables/best-uses-of-drones-in-business-3605145/). From the delivery to the construction industry and from the media to the security industry. It is incredible for how many purposes drones can be used. Personally, I think capacity and battery life won’t be major issues in the future. In Dubai they already developed a drone taxi, a drone that can carry up to 100kg for 30 minutes. The company behind the drone taxi in Dubai aims to have 25 percent of local passenger trips take place in driverless vehicles by 2030. (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-26/dubai-stages-first-public-test-of-volocoptor-drone-taxi) However, I am wondering how long it will take until drones will really disrupt industries, because of drone regulations.
I am actually pretty surprised why Amazon’s drone delivery service is not launched yet. I still remember the first announcement in the news of drone delivery by Amazon, which is already four years ago. I am curious how this will develop in the (near) future.
Hi Lisa
Thank you for your interesting post. I agree that drones have a great potential in the future. However, at the moment there are many different reasons why drones (and the next generation of drones probably) can not yet be implemented. Besides the fact that drones are not yet able to distract heavy packets and are no longer operational for 30 minutes, drones still have more problems. For example, door-to-door delivery is possible with cars, where a drone is unable to land in densely populated areas. Is it possible to get drone delivery mainstream and thus profitable? Without any solutions to these kinds of problems, I fully agree with the fact that it may take a long time before drones can disrupt other industries as well.
Kind regards, Babette