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.

Comments

Wasteful, Inefficient, Potentially Dangerous...

[Akratist]

...but, also kind of cool in so many ways.

Re:Wasteful, Inefficient, Potentially Dangerous...

[taliesinangelus]

I guess I don't understand using this technology for delivering local items. Maybe their just in a shake out phase of testing. I can see that this might be huge for delivering things to areas that don't have good road systems where driving a truck over terrain that may cause it to break down might be considered wasteful.

"Critical medical supplies" comes to mind.

Re:Wasteful, Inefficient, Potentially Dangerous...

[ShanghaiBill]

Why is using a 5 kg drone more wasteful and inefficient than using a two tonne truck?
The truck will be more cost effective for routine, non-urgent, bulk deliveries.
But the drone will be better for urgent deliveries of small items.

Re:Wasteful, Inefficient, Potentially Dangerous...

[Rei]

I'm just the opposite, I don't understand how this would be good for delivering things to remove, inaccessible areas. They're short-range aircraft, and even if they weren't, you wouldn't want to monopolize an expensive piece of hardware doing one-by-one package deliveries to remote areas, tying it up for an hour or two per package. Here it's short quick hops, then back to charge and be ready to be quickly launched again.

As for the need, it's the same reason as why people choose short delivery periods today. Maybe it's a broken part on your factory line that's costing you a ten thousand dollars an hour. Maybe you're leaving on a trip in an hour and you forgot to pick up something you're going to need. Maybe you're a hospital and speedy delivery could save a patient's life. Maybe you're about to give a presentation at a conference and you discover you need something. Maybe you ran out of petrol and you could really use a couple liters. Maybe you're holding a party and discover you've run of / forgot to pick up some essential item. There's countless reasons why a person may need objects under a couple kilograms delivered quickly - let alone why they may just simply want something quickly (the whole "dammit, I want to be playing around with that new purchase *now*!" attitude)

Beyond speed, if drone delivery takes off (pardon the pun), it could potentially (must stress "potentially") reduce costs for delivery services as well. Ultimately you could completely take humans out of the equation. You're running off of electricity. You need a lot more delivery drones than trucks, but they're also going to be a lot cheaper. Quicker deliveries mean reduced inventory management. Etc. So there's a possibility that it might in the long run prove cheaper. Trucks could increasingly be just for heavy stuff, or paired with drones (aka, the concept of having the truck drive through the general area and drones deliver to the final destination within a few kilometers of the truck as it goes, then returning to its new position, so that the truck doesn't have to weave into every little side street).

Re:Wasteful, Inefficient, Potentially Dangerous...

[mrex]

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?!

Re:It is pathetic that this is being done in china

[Karmashock]

Google has been trying... they went from sending almost nothing to washington to basically sending them all money.

Regardless, I wasn't talking about congressman. I was talking about lower level bureaucrats. You see it in a lot of countries. You get pulled over for speeding or whatever and you can make it go away by slipping the officer a reasonable bribe. Sometimes all it takes is 10 bucks. Sometimes they want more.

If the government isn't going to be rational on the subject then they need to be subverted in various ways.

Musk was saying that he was seriously constrained by US regulations as to how he built the Teslas. He has to have a blank space on his dash board for example so that there is room to put in a tachometer. His car is electric and they don't have tachometers. But government regulations say you have to have at least the spot on the dashboard for it. And he had to put in side view mirrors instead of side view cameras. He wanted to do away with the mirrors and do it instead with CCTV. Forbidden. Lots of little things. He says the regulations amounted to something like a phonebook of regulations that any car has to meet to be road legal. It is over regulation.

What a car needs to be is safe. It needs to be able to navigate the roads safely. That's it. Then you bring your car in for an inspection and they determine if it is safe. Specifying everything out to the nth degree is idiotic. And that is what they're doing with everything including this bullshit FAA drone license crap.

You didn't need a license to fly a remote controlled airplane. Who cares so long as whatever it is stays out of controlled airspace and below 500 or so feet. The whole thing is asinine.

Re:China

[goombah99]

Yummy neurotoxins in their shrimp and fish, melamine in their infant formula, firewalled global internet, and censored bloggers. Before the Pure Food and Drug Act in the US it was common for bakeries to add sawdust to bread, and then there's the great killing fogs of industrial england.

freedom from regulation isn't freedom in all cases.

Re:Missing Something

[ArcadeMan]

It doesn't land. It hovers and drops the package.

It should drop the package from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.