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

Practical jokes

[Beardo the Bearded]

A buddy and I were talking about how you could prank someone with this.

Find a couple out on a date, wait for the guy to check his phone, then order drone-delivered condoms.

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.

Re:Still not legal, right?

[Dutch Gun]

These things only go the last part of the journey, and only with small, lightweight objects (about 5lbs or so). You're still going to need a massive delivery fleet to move everything to local warehouses from other states or countries, and for heavier or bulky items you'll still need traditional delivery vehicles. There are also going to be many areas or sites for which drone delivery simply isn't practical.

Moreover, I think this is not going to be a rapid transition either. It's likely to be something that's phased in over a few decades, not a few years, so you won't see a sudden effect on the economy.