Kiva Systems Co-Founder: Drone Delivery Could Be As Low As 20 Cents Per Package

Hallie Siegel writes A year ago, Amazon announced its plans for Prime Air — a drone delivery service. Recently Amazon has been posting job ads, saying they are looking for drone pilots. Whatever the regulatory issues, is drone delivery financially feasible? ETH Zurich professor Raffaello D'Andrea thinks it is economically feasible to deliver small packages by drone. D'Andrea is responsible for the Flying Machine Arena ("a space where flying robots live and learn") and is co-founder of Kiva Systems, the company acquired by Amazon for $775 million in cash that innovated the robotic fulfillment system that Amazon is now implementing in many of its warehouse facilities.

Comments

Re:Still not legal, right?

[AgNO3]

People often forget that the air space over your property to like 300 feet is the property owners and they can and have had people arrested for trespassing for their drones being in their airspace. This has already been to many a court case over air rights. The FAA doesn't even if made legal to fly have the right to say you can fly in a private properties airspace. It would be interesting to see how many nets people put up to their max air space if people start flying drones with valuable stuff over their property. The FAA has ZERO say over your air rights and it varies by state as to how high they go. So they would pretty much be limited to following the roads.