Both when I read this and when I heard amazon's announcement, I, like most people I see here, thought about the "get whatever I order off the internet to my doorstep, asap" use case--and I think that's still a ways off (because of the 0.01% edge cases, the regulation, etc).
But the use case that this article touched on, which to me was a "ah ha! we could do that today" is the case where the sending and receiving parties are more fixed (not just any random person's door), where they could actually build a drone-pad (like a heli-pad, but much more basic), where you could program in all of the specific obstacles on the route (exactly where, if there are electrical lines, what flight pattern to take, etc), and where you could train both the sender and receiver, and cord off the landing area (so you'd never run into the random guy or dog tries to grab the drone problem)
examples:
* delivery of medical supplies/medicine to a facility in a very remote area where it would not make sense to stock the items there permanently.
* very expensive restaurant at a ski resort in the middle of Colorado that gets a drone delivery of fresh seafood from a CA pier every day (an existing business transaction they do anyway that could be done faster, more efficiently than a human operated aircraft)
* the delivery of anything else to a ski resort (you have very wealthy people wanting things in a very remote location)
* something on top of a cruise ship, for medical items or whatever other thing a passenger really needed while at sea.
* something at the Ebola treatment areas right now in Africa.
I used to work for a BioMedical company that paid $500 a trip for guaranteed couriers to pick up plasma from a medical facility and get it to an airport (in a short time frame) to be shipped half-way across the country, where the same thing had to happen in reverse... The treatment they performed on the plasma cost the patient $15k, and there were several times where a helicopter was brought in to navigate around gridlock, as the cost of a second treatment was an order of magnitude greater.
Something like this would be incredible for allowing access to specialized medicines at drastically lower costs. There were many locations that they were unable to get guaranteed couriers, and hence couldn't offer their treatment at any price...
Or reinvent the trusty old mailbox as a drop zone for drones. Google can't realistically handle all the edge cases so crowdsource the edge case resolution to the owner of each house. They can decide where they want to put their drop zone containers. The design of the drop zone container can be optimized to stand out on CV algos which the drone can then use to home in for delivery. This also works in multi-story apartments where there's a common drop zone for the entire apartment and it's left to the residents to sort it to the appropriate owners.
I wonder if it's possible to design a drop chute instead of a drop zone container so that the drone never needs to do the winch thing; the drone drops the package into the chute at it's current hover height and takes off while the chute takes care of slowing the package down to the ground.
In any case, this is an exciting area ripe for experimentation and bold ideas.
> the drone drops the package into the chute at it's current hover height and takes off while the chute takes care of slowing the package down to the ground.
Skip hover, we don't need 10cm accuracy yet.
What's the cheapest way I can deliver one or multiple payloads from a fixed wing aircraft at 5000 feet to a 100x100 ft 'package' zone with 99.9% accuracy? (in any weather condition).
we grow quickly by letting people with big backyards sign up to be the delivery zone, then manage the last miles on their own.
Yeah, personally if it meant I could get packages shipped to me more cheaply/quickly/reliably, then I would definitely be motivated to minimally modify my "house" to make it more palatable to the delivery drones.
Also it may help to increase data transfer bandwidth (but not latency) for large backups if it transports hard drives. :) Especially because SSDs are so light. But the packet loss could be risky if somebody founds your packet and it's not encrypted.
Deliveries are still a pain right now because you have to be present at the destination to receive the package. Or you have to fetch the package yourself at a designed location. I believe that a lot of Internet sales are lost to local businesses because of that.
In the future it will be common for homes to have a drop point that accepts larger parcels than mail. It will be a feature that people are going to look for when renting/buying homes. With that in place and a good standard drone delivery will also become more practical for the last mile.
Ideally someone would step up and develop a standard similar to what happened to shipping containers. That would help the adoption tremendously.
Do we need a standard? We could do this now. Just put something like a postbox at your front door where you can put parcels in, but not out (without a key).
From what I have seen people do arrange drop points once they get to know the delivery guy. If the guy leaves to another location it has to be arranged again with the new guy.
By having a standard UPS/.. could be notified that you have a "A1" container available. Any parcel that fits in that container can be delivered without arranging a meeting time.
It could be done today in rural households but in cities, room would need to be made for these new containers.
Delivery of lots of things for search and rescue operations would probably be pretty useful, if somewhat niche.
I've heard of quite a few S&R stories where they knew where the person was but couldn't safely get there until daylight. It seems like being able to drop off a care package in such situations would be useful.
In some situations like harsh cold snowy weather a drone is unlikely to be of much use, but dropping a couple of liters of water to someone stuck overnight in the desert could be the difference between pulling in a dangerously dehydrated lost hiker in the morning versus picking up someone who just needs a lift back to civilization.
Of course, drones (even sans delivery ability) seem like a good fit for S&R anyway -- relatively cheap (compared to manned helicopter searches) and safe way to cover last known areas of missing folks to try to locate them from the air.
One of the cases the MatterNet folks are considering is the rapid movement of medical samples from, eg a mobile clinic to a central laboratory.
It has the added advantage of being high-importance but low-cash-value, reducing any incentive from (hypothetical) drone-nappers and making the experience a positive one for the general public in the area of operation.
It is difficult to imagine how those examples could be accomplished using a drone alone (with limited range and capacity). I think that delivery automation is a good idea but it must be very difficult to link up disperate types of service without relying on massive monolithic courier companies.
How about a "drone pony express" where carrier has a bunch of intermediate stations within range of each other based on the drone's capability; the package is handed off from the "tired" drone to the the "fresh" drone, and the "tired" drone is hooked up to a charging station.
But the use case that this article touched on, which to me was a "ah ha! we could do that today" is the case where the sending and receiving parties are more fixed (not just any random person's door), where they could actually build a drone-pad (like a heli-pad, but much more basic), where you could program in all of the specific obstacles on the route (exactly where, if there are electrical lines, what flight pattern to take, etc), and where you could train both the sender and receiver, and cord off the landing area (so you'd never run into the random guy or dog tries to grab the drone problem)
examples:
* delivery of medical supplies/medicine to a facility in a very remote area where it would not make sense to stock the items there permanently.
* very expensive restaurant at a ski resort in the middle of Colorado that gets a drone delivery of fresh seafood from a CA pier every day (an existing business transaction they do anyway that could be done faster, more efficiently than a human operated aircraft)
* the delivery of anything else to a ski resort (you have very wealthy people wanting things in a very remote location)
* something on top of a cruise ship, for medical items or whatever other thing a passenger really needed while at sea.
* something at the Ebola treatment areas right now in Africa.