The economics of the delivery drone. Is it sustainable?

There's a lot of debate around the economic suitability of drones for the delivery of the goods as a direct competitor to traditional trucks and delivery vans.

There's an article written by Flexport which highlights two crucial factors that makes drones delivery of general goods not feasible, even in the near future: (1) route density and (2) drop size. Route density is the number of drop-offs you can make on a delivery route and drop-size is the number of parcels per stop on that delivery route.

Given the strict airspace regulations on drone size and weight, it has become quite evident, particularly in the African context, that the delivery of general goods will not be an economically viable option even though the obvious need might say otherwise.

However, further analysis and demonstration have shown, from companies like Matternet and others, that the transport of the time-sensitive and high-value parcels (legal-documents, medicine samples, high-value spices, special equipment, etc) can be a viable business in relation to the alternative methods. Given the lack of roads, telecommunications within many African countries, such parcels have attracted a lot of interest.

So the question lies, what type of drone solutions will satisfy customer appetite for trusting drones with their time-sensitive item (especially since they have no control on its route) and yet be accessible enough to conform to airspace regulations?

A question still doesn't have an answer. That's why we're keen on researching it.

Until next time.

Paulin

Comments

Setting up the Tarot T4-3D gimbal on the Pixhawk 2.4.8 with Specktrum dx6 Gen2 toggle switch

So i took the challenge of setting up the Tarot gimbal not just for inherent stable video footage but also the flexibility of controlling it from the radio control. However, I encountered quite a few challenges which made me aware that I'm not the one only in this battle . It's quite clear that the setup of the Tarot gimbal using its own software is completely different from how it's been described in the Ardupilot/Arducopter webpage and in mission Planner. In Mission Planner and it's associated site makes one believe that it should be done through software, only to realize that in actual fact the setup is more complex than that. After two evenings of trying various combinations, I realized the getting the pixhawk Aux channels to communicate with the T4 gimbal requires the following steps: - The Pixhawk Pin9 (Aux1) needed to be activated to pass through user-chosen channel from the transmitter. For the Dx6 Gen2 it was the channel 6, which can assigned the ...

Setup ArduPilot flight modes with DX6 Gen 2

Hi, I've looked around the web to get an understanding the setup of the Ardupilot flight modes with a Spektrum DX6 2nd generation and there was none. So I decided to write this blog. The few things to consider when doing this: Please follow the instruction given on the ardupilot webpage . Have the Pixhawk hardware connected to Mission Planner (I have 1.3.50 - Copter V3.5.3) Use the display bar in the Radio Calibration page as a guide while changing the rate pulse widths on your transmitter. I've used switch D to change the pulse width ranges on channel 5.

Matlab to C/C++ code development - Some learning points

Over the last few years, the engineers at the company have invested both their time and sleepless nights in formulating a process for the development of Machine learning algorithms that will satisfy real-time constraints with minimal RAM usage. This is quite a tall task as per default, that would force one to do their development directly in C language. Although that seems like the right choice, the downside is the direct correlation of the debugging time with algorithm complexity. Such a time could have been rather used in optimizing the algorithm within the MATLAB environment which has excellent tools for the analysis, plotting and debugging. So it was decided to rather learn the Code generation process with the hope that future algorithm could be designed in a similar fashion without the hassle of the compiler-specific run-time issues. The development of this machine learning algorithm would eventually be implemented in a 32bit, 160Mhz speed, 260KB RAM microcontroll...

Search This Blog