UPS Tries Arming Its Brown-Clad Drivers With an Octocopter Drone
UPS Tries Arming Its Brown-Clad Drivers With an
Octocopter Drone
Home delivery tested with package at Florida blueberry
farm
‘Rolling warehouse’ system launches aircraft from atop
trucks
by Michael Sasso February 21, 2017, 7:24 AM PST
United Parcel Service Inc. sees a day when your latest
purchase may be dropped off not by a brown-clad delivery driver, but by an
octocopter drone.
The world’s largest courier took a step closer to that
future on Monday, launching an unmanned aerial vehicle from the roof of a UPS
truck about a quarter-mile to a blueberry farm outside Tampa, Florida. The
drone dropped off a package at a home on the property, and returned to the
truck, which had moved about 2,000 feet.
The test shows how UPS is looking to drones as a way to
cut costs and ease delivery in hard-to-reach places. Deploying the aircraft in
rural areas -- where the distance between stops drives up fuel and labor costs
-- is one of the more promising applications.
“Drones won’t replace our uniformed service providers,”
says Mark Wallace, UPS’s senior vice president of global engineering and
sustainability. “That’s key, but in this case, it really is there to assist.”
Monday’s trial was the clearest indication that
Atlanta-based UPS wants to use drones for home delivery, as do internet
retailer Amazon.com Inc. and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Those companies and
others still must overcome significant regulatory hurdles before
delivery-by-drone becomes the norm.
UPS says it hasn’t calculated how much the potential
shift could help cut costs, but estimates in general that reducing each
driver’s mileage by a mile a day could save $50 million a year. The company
operates more than 100,000 road vehicles, according to its website.
‘Rolling Warehouse’
UPS has enlisted Loveland, Ohio-based Workhorse Group
Inc., which makes the courier’s plug-in electric delivery vehicles, to design a
“rolling warehouse” system in which a drone is deployed from the roof of a UPS
truck and flies at an altitude of 200 feet to the destination. It returns after
dropping off the package.
The aircraft weighs 18 pounds and can carry a 10-pound
payload, says Workhorse Chief Executive Officer Steve Burns. The driver can use
a street view of the destination to determine where the item should be
delivered. For safety reasons, the drones currently won’t fly under structures,
such as awnings, so a package may be left several feet from a home’s doorstep.
Whether that is close enough is “part of what we need to
understand,” says Wallace, of UPS. The company hopes eventually to have a
driver continue to the next stop before a drone completes its mission. Previous
tests involved other manufacturers’ drones and niche uses, such as delivering
medical supplies in remote areas of Rwanda.
Security Concerns
Current U.S. regulations generally don’t allow flights
over people or beyond the sight of a drone operator -- at 200 feet over flat
terrain, that’s about a mile and-a-half -- making true deliveries impossible
for now.
Proposed Federal Aviation Administration guidelines for
operation over crowds were supposed to be released by the end of last year but
were delayed by security concerns. The FAA has allowed a handful of companies,
including BNSF Railway Co., to test long-range flights. Such operations won’t
be allowed on a routine basis until later this year at the earliest.
Despite the challenges, “the comfort of having a brown
drone, a brown truck and a brown uniform all close by is a great way to bring
it into the mainstream,” says Burns.
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