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DHL Goes Live With 'Parcelcopter' Drone Delivery Service
jones_supa writes: In December, Amazon announced it intends to deliver packages to customers using drones. But its initiative was widely ridiculed for being an over-hyped announcement with little to show for it. This summer, Google demonstrated its own drone-based delivery service, using a fixed-wing aircraft to deliver little packages to farmers in the Australian outback. But now, German delivery firm DHL has beaten the tech firms to the punch, announcing a regular drone delivery service for the first time, nine months after it launched its "parcelcopter" research project in December 2013. The service will use an quadcopter to deliver small parcels to the German island of Juist, a sandbar island 12km into the North Sea from the German coast, inhabited by 2,000 people. Deliveries will include medication and other urgently needed goods. Flying below 50 meters to avoid entering regulated air traffic corridors, the drone takes a fully automated route, carrying a special air-transport container that is extremely lightweight as well as weatherproof.
Why do they leave out the most interesting piece of information, which is how much cargo it can carry?
I guess they'll not deliver in stormy weather....how about an RC boat?
"In December, Amazon announced it intends to deliver packages to customers using drones."
Up to that point, if you were using drones you had to do your shopping in EBay.
Smugglers are probably wringing their hands in anticipation, but hell, every advancement seems to have some tangential consequence.
Look to the innocent use of black powder for fireworks.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
They steal stuff you post. More than once packages arrived at destination with contents replaced by chinese trinkets (re: funny HK shirts). Box is cut open from side, contents removed, replaced with trinkets.
The drones will also be used to bomb Polish towns and villages. I mean, deliver parcels.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
According to a story I heard recently on NPR, the only currently legal use of drones in the U.S. is in the film industry. The story added that the FAA is expected to take a few years to sort out the rules for commercial drone use. Pilot training programs, certifications and the like will need to be developed and put in place, don't recall any mention of autonomous drones. The air-ways should be truly interesting once Google brings it's ala Jetson car to the mix.
you, will most likely die
by the hands of my arm
when i come and fly
and take over your face
with the front of my PARCELCOPTER
Here's some data on the hardware, from http://ca.reuters.com/article/...
* 65 km/h peak speed, and will cover the distance in about 15-30 minutes;
* It weighs 5kg, and can carry a payload of up to 1.2kg
With 1.2kg it can certainly carry a complement of medicines or even small, urgently needed hardware and parts (batteries or spare bits for medical equipment for instance). Not general use of cours, but it does look like more than just a stunt.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I dont know about you but you could easily carry emergency medications in a 2 1/2 pound payload. There are a lot of extremely valuable things you can fit in a 2 1/2 pounds payload. Now im not sure id want to be the 1st or even 100th customer. Give it a year or two prove reliability then id be okay with it.
and have never heard of that island before.
I had the funny HK shirts I ordered secretly replaced with expensive electronics...what would I do with expensive electronics???
And in other news, the US FAA was heard bellowing, "Get off of my lawn!" to a bunch of kids playing with their remote controlled drones...
The Poles have quite the RC hacking skills
http://humanrightshouse.org/Ar...
This technology has infinite uses. Say for example, there are some politicians in my country to whom I'd like to mail a bag of soggy dog poop. That might be a problem using traditional mail systems, but thanks to drone technology, you can just attach the bag of poop to a drone and pilot it over them as they're walking to work. Then, because the drone is probably busy with other demands, it's probably most efficient if, rather than landing, it just releases the attach hooks and drops that bag from its normal hovering altitude.
See, this is progress, thanks to technological advancement!
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
DHL Global Mail is slightly slower than me walking to wherever the shit is sent from, picking it up myself and walking back home again. 4 WEEKS to get something from Boston to Raleigh? Or maybe 12 days stuck somewhere in Georgia?
But it only understands Parceltongue...
want to clear the terrorists our of cities? then do the unspeakable
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
What's missing is being built to standards. Everything other digital fly by wire airplane over people has triple-string (triple-redundant) flight controls and can fly safely without GPS. This thing? Nope. Drones are only cheaper when you cut out the safety systems.
Parcelcopter? I prefer roflcopters.
The FAA has no problem with kids playing, as long as they don't interfere with manned aviation. What the FAA (and responsible adults) have a problem with is greed motivated corporations blowing off safety to make money. Of course, this is "cool" and "new" so we don't need to worry about 100 years of aviation safety lessons, and thoughtfully apply them. The FAA must be dragging their feet.
When Amazon made their announcement, my first thought was, the parcel-carriers should all be doing it. Sellers might too, but for FedEx, UPS, USPS, DHL and other mail-companies, this is a must going forward.
I even bought some AVAV shares back then — the only publicly-traded company I could find, for whom drone-making is the primary business...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
You know, as much as I want to pooh-pooh the technology as being a stupid waste, there's a few locations that are especially good for this because of the danger of flying people:
Alaska
Yukon
NWT
Nunavut
BC and Washington's Islands (Because limited ferry service generally makes package delivery impossible)
and most of Canada during the Winter because of icy roads.
"Flying below 50 meters to avoid entering regulated air traffic corridors, "
Yeah, how do they guarantee that? Of all the commercial and custom controllers, it's based on some s/w--and has that been reviewed? Likely not.
DHL, we're 1st to market on delivery of stuff, general operations, the cheering in the video. The guardian: they beat everyone to market...
Yeah, right.
That's a $100K Microdrone. DHL had it for 3 yrs LIRC and we end up with this PR stunt? Yes, youtube = PR.
And 1st to deliver? I beg to differ. And these guys got shutdown by the FAA (i.e. a legit business).
Cheer on countrymen....
Don't send anything important. About twenty years ago I found an Emory Worldwide legal envelope (contract for an Orlando land purchase inside) in middle of my potato field in northeast Florida, miles from any paved road. It could only have fallen from a cargo jet, Lord knows where the rest of the container landed.
how expensive is the weatherproof packaging and who pays for its cost?
then it's working off of hype only and not practicality. Quads and multi rotor multimotor airframes are for when stability is the ultimate goal. Deliveries don't need it, and the most efficient/fastest/most able to deal with wind are single rotor helicopters. You'll lift more and carry it farther and fly longer with a "traditional" helicopter, but that doesn't fit the hype bandwagon of the "public imagination" (or kickstarter or angel investors).
Even coaxials have limits and compromises that make them less ideal but are for simplicity of flight. Human pilots need simplicity, autopilots and gyro systems do not. Its easy enough to build a single rotor helicopter that is as stable as a quad, but hobbyists don't do it because that takes all the fun out of learning to fly the thing and the bragging rights when you master it.
A serious drone delivery system would be based on something like a Trex 400 for short range and a Firescout for bigger stuff.