The Future of Drone Delivery Hinges on Predicting the Weather Block by Block
The Future of Drone Delivery Hinges on Predicting the
Weather Block by Block
Drones could soon be flying you books, pills, and
pizzas—but first, they’ve got to figure out what kind of wind gusts to expect
on your street.
By Thomas Black June 21, 2017, 2:00 AM PDT
Imagine a weather report so precise it provides wind-gust
forecasts for individual city blocks. Such micro-weather data may soon become a
reality—and a necessity for future fleets of delivery drones.
As Amazon.com Inc., United Parcel Service Inc., Domino’s
Pizza Inc., and others gear up to launch autonomous drone deliveries of books,
pills, and pizza, companies are realizing it’s the quality of hyperlocal
weather data more than anything else that will steer their packages around
storm clouds and through wind-buffeted urban canyons.
“The weather issue is a very significant one,” said Sean
Cassidy, director of safety and regulatory affairs for Amazon’s drone unit. “We
don’t have anything at the level of granularity that you would need to
operate.”
The push is on to develop traffic-management systems that
will forecast weather conditions down to a single city block, and at elevations
as low as 400 feet. That promises to clear the way for the holy grail of drone
service: automatic flights that make their rounds without pilots controlling
them from the ground as they do now.
And it’s becoming clear that delivery drones themselves
will play an increasingly important role in collecting weather conditions on
their journeys through the sky, relaying that information to computer weather
models and perhaps back to fleets of drones following behind.
Aviation weather reports are currently designed to cover
mostly areas around airports, as well as the high altitudes where airplanes
tend to fly . That’s why existing systems are so ill-equipped to help guide the
thousands of small drone craft that are envisioned taking off and landing from
diverse locales.
Weather reports for drones will rely on multilayered
systems of ground-based weather gauges, sensors on the drones themselves, and
data from national weather services, all feeding computer models, said Marcus
Johnson, a research aerospace engineer at the NASA Ames Research Center at
Moffett Field, California. “It’s not an easy solution,” he said.
Nor will such technology come cheap. An instrument that
records six variables such as wind speed, wind direction, and humidity costs
about $2,500, according to sensor manufacturers. That doesn’t include
installation, maintenance, and sending the data the sensors collect over the
internet.
Meteorologists dream of having sensors cover every square
mile drones fly over, but doing so could be prohibitively expensive, said Jon
Tarleton, chief of weather marketing in the Americas for Finland’s Vaisala,
which manufactures most of the sensors used by the Federal Aviation
Administration at airports.
“The problem is solvable in almost all cases. It just
comes down to cost,” said Tarleton, whose company makes the weather balloons
the National Weather Service sets loose each day to compile the national
forecast.
Urban areas present some of the greatest challenges. Tall
buildings create channels of wind that can clash and swirl into tight eddies,
said Matthias Steiner, deputy director for the National Center for Atmospheric
Research’s Aviation Applications Program. Sun-baked sidewalks opposite shaded
ones just across a street can produce uneven heat waves, causing unpredictable
downdrafts and updrafts. Weather patterns in cities on coastlines or at the
foot of mountains can also wreak havoc.
Autonomous drones, moreover, will have to expend more of
their precious power to stay aloft in extreme temperatures, and to stay on
course when buffeted by winds. That can prevent a drone from making it back to
its home base, Steiner said.
“More and more people are starting to realize that
weather is an important element that you need to factor in, because these
smaller craft are so much more sensitive to weather than the larger aircraft,”
said Steiner, who organized the first meeting with weather experts and drone
participants at a Dallas conference last month, creating a buzz in the
industry.
BNSF Railway Co.—the only company in the U.S. flying
drones long distances, a project it’s undertaken as part of an FAA study—has
called back flights or kept them grounded because of the elements, said Todd
Graetz, director of BNSF’s drone program. The railroad has a big advantage over
other companies looking to begin operating drones: Sensors placed along its
tracks provide trains with information on high winds and heavy rain that BNSF
drone operators can tap into.
Halfway around the world in Rwanda, a company called
Zipline has been using fixed-wing drones to deliver blood supplies to rural
hospitals since October. The effort is generally a success so far, but weather
has been a major obstacle—especially in mountainous regions. Zipline is working
with researchers to build models so it can run scenarios for its drones under
different conditions.
The more climate data, the better, said Zipline
co-founder Keenan Wyrobek. “It’s really about making your systems have margin
for the craziest wind-and-gust conditions, and making sure that doesn’t throw
you into a hill or someone’s house.”
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