Autonomous Drones: A Game Changer in Lightweight Delivery Services

Abstract

Imagine, you placed an order online and received it in minutes. This is the future of drone delivery services. Customers can track the drone during its delivery trip via apps like Uber car. Some cities and even rural areas have already experienced such deliveries. A delivery drone is an unmanned aerial vehicle that is getting increasingly popular to carry packages, medicines, foods and postal mails, and other light goods. In recent years (2013 onwards), Companies such as 7-Eleven, Ali Baba, Amazon, DHL, Domino, FedEx, and Google started their experiment with drone delivery services. However, Flirtey is the first start-up that did drone delivery in the urban setting in the USA with the approval of the Federal Aviation Authority, USA. Japan with the help of German drone company Wing is planning to use drones for different delivery purposes. Wing has recently celebrated 100,000 deliveries with media fanfare. Its drones are autonomous and one operator can monitor several flights in parallel. It claims that the average delivery time is 10 minutes. On 19 November 2021, Sierra Leone in collaboration with the drone company UAVaid delivered medicines by drone for the first time. The trip took 13 minutes, which usually takes 2 hours by ground vehicles. Alphabet­—Google’s parent company—is testing its services in Australia, Finland, and the US. A recent report pointed out that delivery drones are used or under trial to use at least in 26 countries across the world. Customers are also increasingly embracing drone delivery. A recent study found that customers’ preference to embrace drone delivery depends on factors such as price, commodity types, and their gender, age, and household income (Kim, 2020). I searched and collected more than 136 documents and dozens of YouTube videos from online sources that talk about drone delivery. I went through documents and videos to understand the current state of update delivery; many of these documents have been published in the last quarter of 2021 as drone delivery was picking up at this time. It is important to understand the state-of-the-art of drone delivery and this article aims to accomplish this purpose.