Amazon Quadcopter Delivery Plans

Hi all
I have received a lot of questions from friends and family about the Amazon Prime Air delivery (if you have not heard about this check out the video at the bottom of this post). I know for some this is old news, but I am talking about it anyway.

The basic idea is that you can order an item online, and Amazon will use a quadcopter to quickly deliver it to the person’s home. Many people have been talking about the difficulties of this idea by talking about FAA regulations and people stealing the packages. The FAA which has been placing large barriers on small aerial vehicles and trying to exert authority to make themselves feel important has recently been told that they do not have authority to regulate commercial drones. As far as people stealing the payload from these craft; USPS, UPS, and Fed Ex all have a large business based on leaving packages at people’s doorsteps. Any flying quadcopters would need to fly above people and only come close to the ground for the actual delivery. Have you ever tried to throw a rock at something 40ft above in the air? it is not an easy target.

Now there are some issues that will need to be overcome. Current quadcopters have a weight capacity of around 5.5 pounds (2.5kg). What percentage of deliveries is under this weight threshold? While only Amazon can answer this, I know I regularly order things that weigh over 10 pounds.

Another large problem is flight time. Current quadcopters get around 20 minutes of flying time with no payload. With a 5.5 pound payload the flying time might be reduced to only 12 minutes. That means that for a 5.5 pound package the distribution point would need to be within 6 minutes of flying time from the destination. Further if you want to add some margin, you must be within 5 minutes of the distribution point. We need significant new battery technology to improve the flight time.

Quadcopters tend to be very loud. If there are many (or possibly even one nearby) quadcopters in the air, the sound will be completely unacceptable for most people.

So what do I think the solution is? I think we need autonomous self-driving cars/trucks that can carry many packages throughout the city (or have a human driver). We can then use quadcopters to deliver the packages from the trucks on the street to the houses. Each truck can even carry several quadcopters to handle multiple simultaneous deliveries. This will let the quadcopters only require a minute or two of flight time solving the power issue (they can recharge on the truck). With power being less of a concern we can push the weight carrying capabilities of the quadcopter to deliver heavier packages. Further it will be harder for people to steal packages while in transit and the sound will not become as persuasive and annoying.

Main Image from http://www.amazon.com/b?node=8037720011

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