#clear breadbin case

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Why the wait for delivery drones may be longer than expected

THERE is a striking disparity between the commercial applications drone companies are pursuing in fields like construction, inspection or agriculture and the public perception of commercial drones. Media coverage is dominated by one particular application: delivery. Experimental deliveries of parcels, pizzas and other items conjure up visions of skies abuzz with drones ferrying packages to and fro. But although delivery and logistics companies are interested in drones, many drone companies are not interested in deliveries. “It’s not on our immediate radar,” says Paul Xu of DJI.

Astro Teller, the boss of X, Google’s semi-secret research laboratory, is one of the lucky few to have received a delivery by drone. It was dispatched last September as part of a test carried out in Virginia by Project Wing, Google’s drone-delivery programme. Its machines come in a variety of shapes: some are “tail-sitters”, flying wings capable of flipping upright and hovering; others are fixed-wing drones augmented by vertical-axis rotors like those on a quadcopter. Both designs combine the benefits of a fixed-wing aircraft for efficient long-distance flight with those of a multirotor for hovering and vertical take-off and landing. When delivering a package the drones do not actually land but float above the recipient and use a winch to lower their cargo: in Dr Teller’s case, a freshly prepared burrito.

Receiving something by drone is “kind of magical”, he says, launching into an impassioned case for drone delivery. Imagine you had a magic elf that could bring you anything you asked for within a minute or two, provided it could fit in a breadbin. You would no longer worry about what to take with you when going out. Nor would you keep common items, like batteries or perishable foodstuffs, on hand at home just in case you needed them. You might not need to own some rarely used objects at all if you could summon them when needed. Rapid drone delivery could thus accelerate the trend from ownership to access in the “sharing economy”, says Dr Teller. He claims delivery drones could be faster, quieter and more environmentally friendly than large delivery trucks. Project Wing now carries out experimental flights daily.

The technology giant most closely associated with delivery drones is Amazon. When its boss, Jeff Bezos, revealed his plans for drones in December 2013 on “60 Minutes”, an American television programme, they were widely assumed to be a publicity stunt. But Amazon is quite serious: it carried out its first trial delivery to a customer near Cambridge, England, last December—“13 minutes from click to delivery,” says Gur Kimchi, the head of Amazon’s drone effort. In March 2017 it conducted its first delivery demonstration in America, at a conference in Palm Springs. Like Google, Amazon is evaluating a range of different designs, all of which involve the drone lowering its package onto a target in the recipient’s garden or backyard. Logistics firms such as DHL and UPS, as well as some startups, are also looking at drone delivery.

But if widespread drone delivery is to become a reality, many technical and regulatory hurdles must be overcome. These include ensuring that drones do not fall and cause injury, and can land safely if something goes wrong; and preventing collisions with power lines, trees and other aircraft. Moreover, small drones have limited cargo-carrying capacity; not everyone has a garden or backyard; and deliveries require beyond-line-of-sight, autonomous operation, which requires special permission. So at least for now, many drone firms are steering clear. “It’s very challenging, and we do not want to promise something we can’t deliver,” says Mr Xu. “Delivery just bundles together all the hard problems,” says Mr Bry, who worked on Project Wing before leaving to found Skydio. He thinks it could take a decade to solve these problems.

One application where drone delivery may make more sense, and is already in use, is ferrying medical supplies to remote areas that are hard to reach by road. Zipline, an American startup staffed by veterans of Google, SpaceX, Boeing and NASA, began delivering medical supplies in rural Rwanda using fixed-wing drones in October 2016. It has an agreement with the government to deliver blood products to 21 transfusion clinics from two bases, the first of which is already serving five clinics. Zipline’s drones can fly 150km on a single charge and work in rain and winds of up to 30km an hour. They are launched using a catapult, fly below 150 metres (500 feet) and drop cargo packages weighing 1.5kg by parachute.

Rolling out the service means mapping the best routes for the aircraft, which fly autonomously, co-ordinating with military and civilian authorities, training clinic staff to receive cargo and reassuring the local communities along the route. Whether all this is economically viable, or just a publicity stunt by Rwanda’s tech-loving government, is unclear. But the company is talking to governments in other countries about operating similar services, focusing on medical deliveries outside urban areas. It hopes to change public perceptions of the word “drone”. Zipline’s Justin Hamilton says one of the firm’s engineers once told him that he used to work on drones that drop bombs, “and now he builds drones that drop blood.”

Other startups say that drone delivery in urban areas is already possible—but using drones moving on the ground rather than in the air. Starship Technologies, based in Estonia, and Dispatch, based in California, have both developed wheeled, coolbox-sized drones that trundle along pavements to make local deliveries. Starship’s drones are being tested in several cities around the world, and Dispatch is about to begin tests in the San Francisco Bay Area. Both firms use a “partial autonomy” model, meaning that their drones can be remotely piloted for some or all of a route. As the drone approaches its destination, the recipient receives a smartphone alert, and when it arrives he uses his phone to pop open a lockable compartment to retrieve the cargo.

What if people steal the drone? Anyone who tries, says Stav Braun of Dispatch, has “just stolen a homing beacon”. A bigger concern, she says, is ensuring that the robot is courteous and people feel safe around it. But so far the response has been positive.

Instant gratification

Clement Jambou of Unsupervised.ai, a French delivery-drone startup, thinks the steps and kerbs of urban environments will be too difficult for wheeled robots to navigate, so his firm’s delivery drone has legs instead and resembles a dog. He may disagree with Dr Teller on the best way to set about it, but Mr Jambou has a very similar vision for fast, cheap drone delivery. For example, he imagines people renting rather than buying clothes, tools and other household items, dispatched by drone from a neighbourhood depot when needed.

Dr Teller, for his part, is confident that the technical and safety obstacles to flying delivery drones can be overcome. But it will be a gradual process involving “lots of data and demonstration” to satisfy regulators. “The magical elf won’t change the world unless it can go beyond visual line-of-sight, fly over people and have a small number of operators responsible for a large number of vehicles,” he says, none of which is allowed under current regulations. Google is working on making its drones resilient to the failure of a single rotor, battery or motor, the loss of GPS coverage and other potential problems. “We are building up evidence that we can do this safely,” he says. That will take a while, but Google expects its “moonshots” to take up to a decade to pay off. Work on Project Wing began in 2012.

The disagreement over the viability of delivery drones, then, is mostly a matter of timing. For companies that wish to put drones to work now, delivery is not a good bet. But for logistics companies it makes sense to start exploring the possibilities. The end result may well be a hybrid system of delivery trucks that arrive in a neighbourhood and disgorge flying and wheeled drones.

Deliveries are just one of the proposed uses of drones that seem speculative or impractical now but may become significant in future. Facebook, like Google and Amazon, is also investing in drones, but not for delivery: instead its drone, called Aquila, is a huge solar-powered machine intended as a communications relay, to extend internet access to parts of the world that lack connectivity. This will have health and educational benefits, the social-media giant says, but will also help it sign up more users. Aquila made its first test flight in June 2016. Facebook’s boss, Mark Zuckerberg, explained in a blog post afterwards that his goal is “a fleet of Aquilas flying together at 60,000 feet, communicating with each other with lasers and staying aloft for months at a time”, beaming internet access over wide areas.

Making all this work is a lofty goal. In November it emerged that the prototype Aquila had been substantially damaged on landing, triggering an investigation by flight-safety inspectors. And getting permission to fly such aircraft over any populated areas will not be easy. In January Google scrapped its own high-altitude communications-relay drone, Titan.

Dr Teller says that Google now sees more promise for extending internet access in high-altitude balloons; they are easier to keep airborne and much more lightly regulated than drones. Military drones such as the Global Hawk can already act as telecoms relays, so that part of the technology is proven; the challenge is to harness solar power to keep drones aloft for weeks or months, not just a day or two. Large, lightweight UAVs can theoretically use solar power to remain in the air for weeks at a time; a prototype Zephyr drone, built by Airbus, Europe’s aviation giant, stayed aloft for 14 days during a test flight in 2010.

High-altitude drones have also been proposed as a way to generate electricity, because strong winds blow more reliably well above the ground. Known as wind drones or energy kites, such drones are tethered so that cables can deliver the electricity back to the ground. Makani, a startup acquired by Google in 2013, reckons a single energy kite can generate 50% more electricity than a single wind turbine while using only 10% of the materials. Each Makani drone, which resembles a wing with eight propellers, weighs 11 tonnes, compared with about 100 tonnes for a comparable 600kW turbine. This approach is being pursued by other firms too, including Ampyx Power and Kite Power Systems, both backed by E.ON, a German utility. Tethered drones on a smaller scale are also being considered for indoor use in warehouses, where they might help with stocktaking. Flying indoors neatly sidesteps many regulatory problems, and supplying power via tethers does away with the need for recharging. But GPS cannot be used for positioning.

At the lowest end of the spectrum are insect-like drones, just a few centimetres across, that could be used for surveillance inside buildings, search and rescue, or even pollinating plants. Building very small drones is hard because the technology used in larger drones cannot simply be scaled down; different approaches are needed. In a paper published in February in the journal Chem, Japanese researchers explained how insect-sized drones covered in hairs coated with a special gel picked up pollen from one plant and deposited it on another. They concluded that robotic pollinators might offer a remedy for the decline in honeybee populations.

Perhaps the most far-out proposal to date is to use drones to carry human passengers in self-flying taxis. This is harder than using drones for package delivery, because it raises safety concerns for people in the air, not just on the ground. EHang, a Chinese drone firm, hopes to test its one-person drone, which resembles a giant quadcopter with a passenger compartment, in Dubai in July. Other companies, including Airbus, Uber and Kitty Hawk, have proposed similar “flying car” drones. Dario Floreano, a robotics professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (see Brain scan, previous page), has been thinking about passenger drones as part of the European Union’s “myCopter” project. Packages, he says, can withstand sudden accelerations during flight that humans cannot, which makes path-planning and obstacle avoidance more difficult. And the limited energy density of batteries may restrict the range of passenger drones to intra-city hops.

It is a big leap from today’s drones to these sorts of uses. Trying to imagine how drones will evolve, and the uses to which they will be put, is a bit like trying to forecast the evolution of computing in the 1960s or mobile phones in the 1980s. Their potential as business tools was clear at the time, but the technology developed in unexpected ways. The same will surely be true of drones.

This article appeared in the Technology Quarterly section of the print edition under the headline "Can drones deliver the goods?"

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