Uber Elevate, the aerial arm of rideshare service Uber, last week
announced that it will start a fast food delivery by drone test
service later this summer in San Diego.
Delivery destinations won’t be houses or apartment buildings, however, but instead will be “designated safe landing zones,” according to reports.
Those landing zones could include the roof of a parked Uber vehicle in one scenario. An Uber courier would receive the package and hand-deliver it to the consumer.
McDonald’s is one of Uber’s partners, and it has been
developing special packaging to keep food hot and intact during
the aerial portion of a delivery.
Look, Up in the Sky
When Uber Elevate’s drone delivery actually would take flight has been up in the air for some time. The Federal Aviation Administration only granted its approval last week. The
FAA has designated San Diego as one of the 10 U.S. locations for the
testing of commercial drone service.
The southern California city has
become a hotbed of drone research, partially due to the military
presence there, but also thanks to weather that is reliably sunny and calm, ideal drone flying conditions.
Yet even when Uber Elevate is able to get its drone program off the ground later this summer, it likely won’t maintain its air supremacy for long.
Walmart reportedly has filed more drone patent applications than Amazon for the
second year in a row. However, Wing Aviation, which is owned by Google
parent company Alphabet, in April announced that it also has
received
certification from the FAA to begin delivering small packages in two
rural Virginia communities near Blacksburg.
It’s a Drone
Given that drones will be subject to many restrictions —
no flying over densely populated areas, for example — it’s not clear what
advantages they offer over other delivery methods. However, delivery
could be just one part of the role drones play in the near future.
“Drones are for real in key areas of the supply chain — checking
inventory levels in huge distribution centers, flying manufacturing
lines to determine when new parts are needed on the line, inspecting
far flung facilities and pipelines,” said Ted Stank, faculty
director and professor of logistics at the University of Tennessee
Global Supply Chain Institute.
“It is coming — otherwise Amazon, Walmart, Uber, Google, etc., would not
be pushing it so hard,” he told TechNewsWorld.
“Still, I just don’t see it happening soon. There are too many
legislative and regulatory issues to work through before it can scale
to any kind of volume,” Stank added. “For the short term, I think more of a novelty in terms of last mile delivery of products.”
Drone On
Even as drones are tested in San Diego and Blacksburg,
another potential use in the near term is the delivery of medical
items in areas that are difficult to reach by car or even on foot.
“There may be some application for extremely high-value products or
highly perishable ones, or having to get to very difficult-to-reach
locations,” said Stank.
U.S. startup Zipline already is utilizing drones to make blood
deliveries to remote hospitals and aid stations in Rwanda, for example.
“Using drone technology for humanitarian and commercial purposes as
opposed to just recreational ones is inevitable; there is just too
much potential to ignore,” said James R. Bailey, professor of
leadership at the
George Washington University School of Business.
“To human welfare, imagine delivering a vasodilator to someone
suffering an angina episode in half the time it would take an
ambulance to arrive,” he told TechNewsWorld.
The same could hold true for the delivery of food and supplies to an
isolated village after a tsunami or other disaster, explained Bailey. “Such applications will enjoy widespread support.”
Clearing the Air
However, there are a number of issues and challenges that need to be
overcome before drones will be making routine deliveries of Big Macs
and Amazon boxes.
“First, how does the drone access an order effectively and efficiently?
Can it do it automated, or does someone have to load it, at cost?”
pondered Stank.
Then there is the issue of liability.
“What if the drone crashes,” Stank continued, “or what if someone shoots it down to steal the order, which people have jokingly called ‘skeet shooting for
prizes’?”
For those reasons and others, “the flight path to commercial
application will be more turbulent,” suggested Bailey.
“Anything can be hacked these days, including the signals flowing to
drones, and the drones could be downed for the hell of it — hijacked
for theft or cargo tainted,” he added.
“Mischievous boys could launch their own squad for aerial assaults, or
just throw rocks,” Bailey noted. “Such roguery could cause more chaos
than malware. Public patience for business pursuits will be short and
the legal ramifications tall.”
Coming In for a Landing
There are other issues as well, such as where drones could land. As
noted, Uber Elevate is opting to have designated landing zones, such as
on the cars of vehicles marked with QR codes. However, that might not
be practical for all deliveries.
“Zipline literally parachutes the blood products onto hospital roofs
in Rwanda, but that won’t work for most consumer goods,” said Stank.
Then there is the issue of returns, or even stolen packages on the ground.
“Certainly, information technology [including] video camera feeds can
address many of these issues, but can it be done at low cost ? And can
it be scaled for anything other than to make a cool impression and
YouTube video?” questioned Stank.
“There are a lot of supply chain-related applications for drones that
do not require last mile delivery of products. I could foresee
possible uses in ensuring compliance of Uber drivers in the passenger
business, location and ID of shipments for Uber Freight, and any kind
of role that requires visibility into parts of the supply chain that
have typically been difficult to gain access to,” he added.
More Than Crowded Airspace
Another consideration is where exactly drone delivery could take
flight. Some cutting-edge technologies — notably autonomous vehicles —
seem poised for a rollout in urban markets, but as there are
restrictions for flying over densely populated areas, cities such as
New York and San Francisco don’t seem like ideal candidates for
drones.
Thus drone delivery and self-driving cars aren’t likely to be
complementary, and yet both technologies are being
developed by the same companies. Then there is the issue of developing
competition to provide quick and easy food delivery.
“Uber’s business model seems off. They already have countless drivers
eager to swing by a McDonald’s to pick you up some burgers,” said
Bailey.
“Grubhub and others do too, and delivery time in the food industry is
in preparation as much as anything else — think about your last
Chinese or pizza delivery,” he added.
“I get Amazon’s vision for drones, as Amazon has a comparatively small
number of distribution centers,” Bailey pointed out.
“Thus, their drones can return to the same origination for another
pickup, but there are thousands of restaurants in any urban area, and
the margins on food are already razor thin, while the cost of a drone
fleet will raise prices above consumers’ sensitive purchase point,”
he explained.
“Is it scalable and affordable? And can regulatory and legal issues be
resolved?” wondered Stank.
For many of those reasons it is more likely that drones could fill a
void in rural rather than urban markets.
“To make a delivery to a rural location is very expensive — there is no
density of demand and distances can be long, both increasing the cost
of sending a driver in a vehicle to a rural location to deliver one
order very costly. Thus sending a drone makes a lot of sense,” said
Stank.
“In addition, since the drone will not be transiting through populated
areas for the most part, the legal and regulatory issues, as well as
the challenges of safe operation, should be far less than in an urban
area,” he noted.
All of these points could be a moot, as the final decision on where
drones can make delivery rests with the FAA.
“Although some testing sites have been approved, the Federal Aviation
Authority won’t be granting business licenses anytime in the near
future,” said Bailey. “The U.S. has among the safest national air
spaces on the planet. They’re not going to compromise that for one
hour delivery of a Big Mac.”
Peter Suciu has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2012. His areas of focus include cybersecurity, mobile phones, displays, streaming media, pay TV and autonomous vehicles. He has written and edited for numerous publications and websites, including Newsweek, Wired and FoxNews.com.
Email Peter.