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Alibaba Tests Drone Delivery Service In China

Posted by Soulskill on from the making-population-density-work-for-you dept.

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.

4 of 66 comments (clear)

  1. Wasteful, Inefficient, Potentially Dangerous... by Akratist · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Wasteful, Inefficient, Potentially Dangerous... by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Wasteful, Inefficient, Potentially Dangerous... by Rei · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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).

      --
      I would have you sign my banana, but it's on the roof.
    3. Re:Wasteful, Inefficient, Potentially Dangerous... by mrex · · Score: 3, Informative

      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?!