When it comes to highlighting the benefits of a Drone,
the current pandemic has done just so.
On realising the complications and limitations Covid
placed on retail, delivery and other sectors of industry, drones literally
stepped up to the plate and became a lifesaving element.
Food delivery - Zomato
And one sector is food delivery. Zomato, a food delivery
company based in India saw a solution in using drones to efficiently deliver
food through dense traffic.
Testing a payload delivery the drone carried a payload of
5kg and covered over 3 miles in 10 minutes at a staggering 49mph.
Deepinder Goyal, CEO of Zomato said, ‘Fifteen minutes is
only possible if we take the aerial route – roads are not efficient for very
fast delivery. While our biker fleet nowadays delivers in 30.5 minutes on an
average (which is the fastest in the industry as far as we know), every
incremental minute with our fleet becomes harder as it separates our users from
their ordered food.’
Retail is yet another sector which has revelled in the
idea of having drones compliment their business.
Coca Cola
Drink giant Coca Cola has teamed up with DroneUp, a drone
service provider and Walmart to launch is new drink, infused with Brazilian
coffee beans.
And according to website Drone life, DroneUp received an
FAA waiver to fly over people and moving vehicles, to make drone delivery a
possibility.
The collaboration between Coca-Cola, Walmart and DroneUp
allows drone delivery to be more mainstream by targeting general consumers.
This latest project by DroneUp follows its delivery of
Covid test kits to residents in Las Vegas.
Retail - Amazon
In 2019 Amazon announced its latest venture – using
Drones as a means to deliver packages.
As yet, its unclear when Amazon Prime Air will be
functional for consumers but it claims to be able to deliver packages up to 15
miles to customers in 30 minutes or less carrying 5Ibs in weight.
To see what is happening around it, this specific Drone
uses a number of sensors. According to Techcrunch, ‘These include regular
camera images and infrared cameras to get a view of its surroundings. There are
multiple sensors on all sides of the aircraft so that it can spot things that
are far away, like an oncoming aircraft, as well as objects that are close,
when the drone is landing, for example.’
In conjunction with the complex level of sensors,
the team who built the Drone for Prime Air, also uses Visual Simultaneous
Localisation and Mapping (VSLAM), which helps the Drone garner a map of
its current environment even without previous GPS data.
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