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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.
"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.
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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 heise.de it will be be able to carry 1.2kg
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.
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!
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