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Alibaba Tests Drone Delivery Service In China
An anonymous reader writes: Following the lead of online retail giant Amazon, Chinese e-commerce group Alibaba has today tested its first drone delivery service. Asia's largest e-retailer promises to deliver ginger tea within an hour to customers across its flagship consumer-to-consumer marketplace Taobao, which holds an estimated 90 per cent market share in the country. The remote-controlled black and silver drones are helicopter-like in design and carry a white box containing the product. For now the service is limited to a three-day test in three of China's largest mega-cities, Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, and confined to just one tea brand from one merchant. The trial will be applied up to a limit of 450 tea deliveries.
Looks like a standard quadcopter to me. That means it will have a pretty limited flight time and even less once you add weight and some wind. Standard is around 10 minutes. So that is 5 minutes distance in flight.
Off the shelf quadcopters can have multi-kilometer ranges. Not the logistical equivalent of cargo ships, but they're capable in "last mile" scenarios.
Add to that the time you need to change the batteries and add the load and you are easily at 15 minutes for a 5 minute flight.
So just mount multiple drones and allow some to work while the others are charging? You're also free to construct drone waypoints for longer range operations, cargo exchanges in the event of malfunctions, etc.
Add some maintenance/setting up to that and you get to 20.
You think commercial drones require five minutes of maintenance for every 10 minutes of flight?!