As Fast as 3 Minutes! Google’s Drone Delivery Service Completes 100,000 Deliveries? -Part 8

Drones are like birds belonging to nature, and it is difficult for them to find a “habitat” in a big city full of skyscrapers.

According to a report issued by Virginia Tech, when a city’s drone delivery system has been put into use for five years, each consumer can save 56 hours of shopping time per year, and retail participants can have a sale increase of 208,000 U.S. dollars on average per year. An average of 113,900 tons of carbon dioxide annually can be saved in cities.

The positive benefits of saving time, increasing income, and environmental protection have attracted many logistics companies to participate in technological upgrading. However, the technical and regulatory issues encountered during the operation wake up the companies which worship the technology of drones as the only future in logistics.

For example, Wired once reported that Amazon’s Prime Air team had layoffs at the beginning of this year. Compared with the first successful test flight five years ago, Prime Air has had little momentum in recent years. A large part of the reason is that Amazon’s engineers have not yet been able to solve the problem of aerial management and safe delivery, which led to an excessively long project cycle and did not bring expected returns.

At present, drone delivery still has various limitations. Cities lacking low-altitude management regulations are not ready while suburbs with landing conditions may not be able to afford it.

Like autonomous driving, drone delivery is at the apex of technology that the whole industry looks forward to but the construction of the ladder to the top has just begun. The milestone of 100,000 orders may be just a small step up this ladder.