Delivery of goods drones can cost 20 cents

Professor ETH Raffaello D'Andrea in the collection of scientific articles IEEE Automation Science and Engineering опубликовал the results of its study on the economic feasibility of using drones to deliver the goods. After analyzing the various components of such value, the professor concluded that for companies, business components which include the delivery of the goods, the price of such services may be about 20 US cents.

The competence of the scientist in this field is no doubt he is one of the main project consultants Flying Machine Arena , as well as co-founder of Kiva Systems , robotics e-commerce, which was acquired by Amazon in March 2012 for $ 775 million.

Assume that the distance flight for the delivery will be no more than 10 km and a payload UAV (in fact, the goods) will not exceed 2 kg in the range get a lot of consumer products, including the hackneyed example - pizza. Making a few estimates of the technical parameters, the professor concludes that the delivery so will cost only about 10 cents in the sense of the value of the energy consumed in flight, it is impossible not to recognize profitable, even very roughly estimate the cost of a pizza delivery to a conventional car with ICE .

On the other hand, if we consider the cost of the drone at about $ 1,000, add maintenance costs 20% of its value in the year and to determine the amortization period of 5 years, it is possible to obtain an estimate of the cost of delivery is 20 cents, which is still an order of magnitude smaller than Amazon now pays from $ 2 to $ 8 per unit cost. Then, if we recognize assessment professor true, then the Amazon economy can make a fantastic figure of $ 3.538 billion at 2013 prices.

In fact, it is, of course, is not so easy and there are several challenges that have not yet been finally solved. For example, a really precise navigation in urban environments, the account of all possible situations in flight (assuming fully autonomous drone) or script delivery Condo same pizza require development, and perhaps the price of delivery will have to be adjusted in a big way.

Source: geektimes.ru/post/242550/

Tags

See also

New and interesting