German delivery firm DHL has beaten the tech firms to the post, announcing a regular drone delivery service for the first time, nine months after it launched its “parcel-copter” research project in December 2013.
The service will use an autonomous quadcopter to deliver small parcels to the German island of Juist, a sandbar island 12km into the North Sea from the German coast, inhabited by 2,000 people. Deliveries will include medication and other goods that may be “urgently needed”.
There are still hitches to overcome. Although the flight is automated, the parcel-copter will be “constantly monitored” by a ground station on the German mainland for safety reasons, and to ensure compliance with the nation’s regulations. The ground station will also liaise with air traffic control. Nonetheless, the company is taking orders for the parcel-copter’s regular flights, which islanders can place at the island’s pharmacy. The scheduled flights will focus on times when conventional ways of delivering packaged, such as ferries and manned flights, are not available.
In December, Amazon announced that it intended to deliver packages to customers using drones. But its “Amazon Prime Air” initiative, revealed on US current affairs show 60 Minutes, was widely ridiculed for being an over-hyped announcement with little to show for it.
DHL’s scheme is similar in practice to that detailed by Amazon: a small rotary-blade copter, carrying packages to and from locations which it delivers by landing. But DHL has overcome several of the difficulties that Amazon faces in launching its own service: the copters do not have to navigate complex urban and suburban environments, nor do they have to deal with the possibility of vandalism or theft once they land.
Citation
“Deutsche Post DHL Tests Delivery Drone | News | DW.DE | 09.12.2013.” DW.DE. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Sept. 2014.
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