Jeff Bezos said Amazon drones would be bringing toothpaste and cat food to
Americans’ homes within four or five years. That was nearly nine years ago.
Oops.
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This week, Amazon
said it planned to start its first drone deliveries in the US sometime in 2022,
maybe, in one town in California.
Today’s newsletter
addresses two questions: What is taking so long for drone deliveries? And are
they better than other ways of bringing goods to our door?
The bottom line:
For the foreseeable future, drone deliveries will be handy in a limited number
of places for a small number of products under certain conditions. But because
of technical and financial limitations, drones are unlikely to be the future of
package delivery on a mass scale.
Drone deliveries
are a significant improvement for some tasks, like bringing medicine to people
in remote areas. But that’s less ambitious than the big drone dream Bezos and
others pitched to the public.
Why are drones so difficult?
Mini aircraft that operate without human control face two significant
obstacles: The technology is complex, and governments have required lots of red
tape — often for good reason. (In the
US, regulatory issues have largely been
worked out.)
Dan Patt, an
experienced drone engineer and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute research
group, said he and I could make our own delivery drone in a garage in about a
week for less than $5,000. The basics are not that hard.
But the real world
is infinitely complex, and drones cannot deal with that. At rapid speeds,
drones must accurately “see” and navigate around buildings, electrical wires,
trees, other aircraft, and people before landing on the ground or sending packages
down from a height.
GPS might conk out for a split second and crash the drone.
There is little room for error.
“Solving the first
part of the problem is really easy,” Patt said. “Solving the full problem to
make drone delivery fully robust is really difficult.”
The typical
technologists’ approach is to think smaller, which means confining drones to
relatively uncomplicated settings. Startup Zipline focused on using drones to
deliver blood and medical supplies to health care centers in relatively spread-out
parts of Rwanda and Ghana where driving was difficult. A typical suburb or city
is more complex, and vehicle deliveries are better alternatives. (Lockeford,
California, where Amazon plans its first US drone deliveries, has a few
thousand people living in mostly spread-out households.)
That’s still an
incredible achievement, and over time drones are becoming more capable of
making deliveries in other types of settings.
The even trickier
problem, Patt said, is that drone deliveries might not make economic sense most
of the time. It’s cheap to stuff one more package on a UPS delivery truck. But
drones can’t carry that much. They can’t make many stops in one flight. People
and vehicles still need to take the cat food and toothpaste to wherever the
drones take off.
“I think it’s
small markets, small concepts, niche uses for the next 10 years,” Patt said.
“It’s not going to scale to replace everything.” Some people who work on drones
are more optimistic than Patt, but we’ve seen similar optimism in other areas
fall short.
Overpromising and underdelivering
The parallels between drones and driverless cars kept jumping out at me.
Drone technologists told me that, as with driverless cars, they misjudged the
challenge and overestimated the potential for computer-piloted vehicles.
Reliable drone
delivery and driverless cars are a good idea, but they may never be as
widespread as technologists imagined.
We keep making the
same mistakes with automated technology. For decades, technologists kept saying
that driverless cars, computers that reason like humans and robotic factory
workers would soon be ubiquitous and better than what came before. We want to
believe them. And when the vision doesn’t pan out, disappointment sets in.
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