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.

Comments

How much?

[Mr D from 63]

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?

Re:How much?

[GameboyRMH]

Because it's going to be less than the weight of a large candy bar. 12km is a very long flight for a quadcopter. I'm surprised they didn't use a fixed-wing aircraft. It would be harder to automate but one RC pilot's salary isn't a bad price to pay for this publicity stunt.

Re:How much?

[Anonymous Coward]

According to heise.de it will be be able to carry 1.2kg

Re:How much?

[Barsteward]

they will also monitor it being shot at by kids and adult kids as it flies passed

Re:How much?

[AlecC]

Standing in the sea? People on boats tend, usually, to be a little more responsible. Ad at below 50m, they will either have to be expecting it or be pretty fast at grabbing their guns - I doubt it will be in sight for more than perhaps 10 secs.

Re:How much?

[AlecC]

Certainly German police would take a much stricter view than US police, and random people are much less likely to have guns within grabbing distance.

Customers using drones.

[Thanshin]

"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.

Pretty Cool

[rmdingler]

I can see how these would be useful in parts of Alaska in the winter, especially for medications, from the good folks of Canadia, of course.

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.

Re:Pretty Cool

[Yetihehe]

Smugglers are probably wringing their hands in anticipation, but hell, every advancement seems to have some tangential consequence.

Already done. http://arstechnica.com/tech-po... http://www.usatoday.com/story/...

Re:Pretty Cool

[tompaulco]

I can see how these would be useful in parts of Alaska in the winter

Unless, of course, it is cold or windy.

Ze war

[RWerp]

The drones will also be used to bomb Polish towns and villages. I mean, deliver parcels.

Copter data

[JanneM]

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.

Re:Copter data

[wagnerrp]

A single rotor is certainly not more efficient

In terms of thrust per unit power, larger disk area is always better than smaller. That's why turbofans use less fuel than turbojets. That's why props use less fuel than turbofans. That's why helicopters can lift so much weight, but propeller aircraft can very rarely accelerate vertically.

especially if powered by a combustion engine.

Electric motors typically operate at around 90% efficiency, while combustion engines are closer to 30%. On the other hand, that combustion engine will use fuel with an energy density some 40x better than the best batteries we have. If you expect to have any significant loiter or range, you're going to need a lot of energy storage, and that very quickly means your battery powered aircraft simply won't cut it. This is why we don't have battery powered aircraft.

Also every crash landing completely destroys the 'drive section' of a helicopter. A quad copter (made 90%) from plastics likely only needs a battery charge after a crash

Who cares? First, the whole purpose of drones is supposed to be that they're disposable. They're cheap enough to source and operate that you're not supposed to care too much if you lose one. Besides, in this application, carrying medical supplies, the payload is going to be valued at far far more than the aircraft itself.

Also, you're fooling yourself if you think a several kg object made of plastic and impacting at 30m/s is going to survive. This is real hardware, not your RC toy.

Automating a helicopter, especially to fly in narrow areas or under strong, quickly changing wind, is much much harder than automating a quad copter, or octo copter.

You're going to have to explain your logic on this one to me. On a quad copter, you vary the RPM of your independent motors to shift the center of thrust. On a traditional helicopter, you change the pitch of your swashplate to vary the angle of attack of your rotor and shift the center of thrust. The only difference I can see between the two different control systems is that the quad copter requires an additional matrix mixer on its outputs, and reacts more slowly since it has to fight inertia.

1.2kg = 2.64 pounds

[voss]

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.

Me too...

[voss]

I had the funny HK shirts I ordered secretly replaced with expensive electronics...what would I do with expensive electronics???

Poop bombs - go!

[water-and-sewer]

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!