For the time being, delivery boys are safe from disruption in my town. It'll be a while until drone delivery comes after their jobs here. But it eventually will.
One of the domains that keeps getting disrupted - and AIs play a role in that - is logistics and delivery. Drone delivery is obviously a major improvement for the speed of delivering small packages in urban or remote, hard-to-access areas in a reasonable time frame.
But things haven't been easy. It's one thing to have a person with a drone managing it, it's another to have a swarm of drones flying autonomously.
Generated with Ideogram.
In the latter case, they need to be able to avoid obstacles in the air, like hot air balloons, birds, helicopters, small airplanes, or... other drones. Big airplanes are not an issue since they have distinct flight corridors. Wind is also a factor they need to compensate for to reach the precise destination they've been given.
Recently, many companies involved in drone delivery received the FAA approvals in the US to fly their drones Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLS), which allows them to fly at higher distances and autonomously, without a pilot controlling them. This will scale up drone deliveries significantly (already started).
Another problem these companies need to overcome is autonomy given by the charge of the battery, since most of them are electrical. It's an optimization process that needs to be happen: a bigger battery offers more power, but a heavier drone has a higher consumption per kilometer. So, a bigger battery comes at the expense of a smaller package that can be carried or there is no improvement in the distance the drone can cover without needing to recharge. The alternative is to make better batteries, more efficient. And since there is so much focus on EVs these days, it's very likely we will see these improvements in batteries too.
But their challenges don't stop here, as it is expected from a new technology. From concerns about privacy (most if not all delivery drones have both acoustic and visual sensors, among others, to be able to navigate autonomously), to concerns about noise pollution of residential areas (during one of the pilot programs, Amazon drones were described like a loud bee hive) or the traffic management, once their number grows exponentially (an AI control "tower" for them would likely fix that), or last-mile drops in highly dense urban areas (like sky scrapers), are just some of the problems they face.
Some of the obstacles are easier to tackle than others. One discovery would disrupt everything once again, and would remove all the other issues too, but would come with its own set of concerns is teleportation (not sure I'd be as excited about food replicators). I wonder if I'll catch teleportation (for retail use) during my lifetime. The question is, who wants to invent teleportation when there are so much money still to be made from drone or rocket delivery?
Posted Using InLeo Alpha