Future of drone delivery clouded as new hurdles emerge
LONDON: The future of drone delivery of medical supplies and food is being clouded by legal and logistical hurdles.
From the roof of a shopping centre in Logan, south of Brisbane, delivery drones whiz overhead carrying small parcels to customers in surrounding suburbs.
It’s one of a growing number of food delivery hubs in the city operated by Wing, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet.
Wing established a world-first drone delivery facility in Canberra in 2019.
But 100,000 deliveries and one viral attack from a bird later, flights have stopped in the national capital to focus on expansion in Logan.
Australia’s aviation regulator, the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA), was way ahead of the curve in regulating delivery drones, providing a years-long head-start globally.
Head of government relations and public policy for Wing Australia, Jesse Suskin, said the company’s new rooftop model in Logan centralises delivery drones with food vendors for maximum efficiency.
“And that means merchants no longer have to bring things to the warehouse or set up kitchens in the warehouse to prepare things for drone delivery,” he said.
“It means more people can actually have access to drone delivery.”
If you’re in range, you can place an order on your phone — which is prepared by a vendor and given an express elevator to the roof.
From there it’s attached to a drone, which autonomously takes off, delivers the package and returns to the roof to do it again.
Mr Suskin said Logan was targeted because of its residential growth and often lacking proximity to local shops.
Wing deliveries are capped at 1.05kg, which Mr Suskin says is obviously not going to replace a weekly shop anytime soon, but can help supplement it a few items at a time.
For now, Logan remains Wing’s main focus in Australia and Mr Suskin says a slow and steady approach is best.
“I think the approach the government here is taking is the right one,” he said.
“That crawl, walk, run approach has served Australia well.”
Short-range drone delivery is known as last-mile, while longer range medical deliveries form another distinct section of the industry.
Australian operator Swoop Aero has been delivering medical items in Africa since 2020 and has since expanded to five other countries on the continent.
The company says it’s delivered more than 1.6 million items by drone and plans to be available to a billion people by 2030.
Last year Swoop Aero established Australia’s first medical delivery network in regional Queensland, which they say is the largest of it’s kind in a high-income country.
Drones are being used within the network to transport medical items between hospitals and deliver pharmacy products to homes.
Swoop co-founder and chief executive Erick Peck said drones can provide equitable access to healthcare for people living in regional areas.
“So the two million Australians who don’t live within an hour of a hospital or the 60 million Americans that don’t live within an hour of a pharmacy,” he said.
“Or whether we’re talking about how to decarbonise a metro logistics network by picking the 10 per cent of locations that have 50 per cent of the road kilometres and taking them out to help us get to net zero by 2030.
“That’s kind of how we can add value back to this technology.”
Swoop’s Queensland network currently has regulatory approval for an area of 40,000km2, with plans to expand it by 150,000km2 in the future.
Mr Peck says this network could one day extend into Brisbane’s metro area as well, connecting the southern third of Queensland with a vast network of delivery drones.
Amazon founder and then-CEO Jeff Bezos made a bold proclamation in a 2013 episode of 60 Minutes that drone delivery was mere years away from take off.
In the decade since, skepticism and backlash has never been far behind the technology’s attempts to roll out in the real world.
Amazon Prime Air has been the poster child, with missed milestones, mass layoffs and a wildfire sparked by a drone crash.
But the wider industry has been making steady progress.
Total global drone deliveries jumped 80 per cent from 2021 to 2022, according to consulting firm McKinsey.
Projections for 2023 show the same trend and are likely to exceed one million deliveries over 12 months for the first time.
The Asia-Pacific leads the globe in total deliveries, bolstered by Australia and China’s established last-mile food networks in Logan and Shenzhen respectively.
Africa’s many health delivery networks have made it a close second.
They include, but are not limited to, six operated by Swoop Aero and five by American startup Zipline.
Zipline’s delivery operations in Rwanda particularly have helped transform the country’s healthcare system.
A paper published in the Science Robotics journal found Zipline’s delivery of blood led to a 51 per cent decline in the death of new mothers experiencing postpartum haemorrhaging and a 67 per cent decline in the expiration of blood.
Zipline co-founder and chief executive Keller Rinaudo Cliffton said the promises of Amazon in 2013 set an unrealistic expectation about the timeline the technology was on.
“I think that there is this sense of like, yeah, we were promised this is going to happen, it didn’t, so it must be impossible,” Mr Cliffton said.
But as the company approaches its 10 millionth item delivered, Mr Clifton says the technology has less to prove than ever before.
“The systems are scaling, they’re offering it nationally, 24/7, 365 [days a year], serving tens of millions of people, saving lives, reducing logistics costs for health care systems,” he said.
The United States has lagged behind other regions with its drone delivery regulation.
Its aviation regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), has been conservative in integrating the technology into its very crowded airspace.
Chief advocacy officer for global drone advocacy group Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), Michael Robbins, said this had stalled expansion for operators, who have had to make do with individual exemptions per location.
“Without a rule in place allowing operations to scale, that is really holding the industry back,” he said.
“Instead each company has to go through a fairly laborious process each time they want to open up a new site for delivery and it takes a lot of time.”
The lack of Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) approvals has been the most limiting factor, though.
A BVLOS approval requires companies to physically monitor drones doing a delivery from start to finish, resulting in bizarre scenes like watchtowers being installed in Walmart carparks.
But late last year, Zipline made history with its FAA approval to operate BVLOS flights out of it’s Salt Lake City facility, which the company says have since also begun at their Arkansas site.
“The way to think about it is you’re going from serving maybe 2,000 homes to serving more like two million homes from a single hub or distribution centre,” Zipline CEO Keller Rinaudo Cliffton said.
“That’s why that approval is so important, it means you’re increasing by 1,000 times the number of customers whose lives can be improved by the technology and by the service.”
Weeks after that decision, Wing also received BVLOS approval to deliver in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Including within previously restricted airspace around the city’s international airport, a landmark regulatory hurdle critics long thought out of reach.
Zipline and Wing will be teaming up with Walmart to offer drone delivery in Dallas-Fort Worth, eventually servicing 75 per cent of the city’s population.
Long range medical delivery is a proven model for drone delivery in regions like Africa, with poor road infrastructure and less dense airspace.
Last-mile drone delivery is making progress but has more questions to answer, mainly surrounding the cost to consumer and competition from food delivery apps.
Editorial director of Commercial UAV News, Jeromiah Karpowicz, said there were still a lot of questions around how market demand for drone delivery will look after its novelty wears off.
“Once the novelty wears off, what is the interest, what are the logistics, what’s the model that makes sense for the consumer and for the drone manufacturer?” he said.
“Exactly how that’s going to play out in terms of the market demand and what people are going to pay for something to be delivered by drone or how that changes expectation.
“To be honest, I don’t think that that has been really resolved on any level.”
