Don’t Expect Urban Drone Delivery Soon

Amazon and Google might be chest-thumping about their respective drone delivery programs but the technology is still years out from being feasible in dense urban environments. Dr Mirko Kovac, director of Imperial College London‘s current aerial robotics lab, suggests it could be as far out as a decade.
“Drone delivery in cities is still something that it’s not sure how feasible it is in a big city like London for example,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch, noting that safety remains the key challenge for Amazon et al operating drones in urban areas.
“Flying close to humans, flying close to buildings, flying close to other flying vehicles, and legislation, insurance, air traffic control, all this needs to be sorted before something like this can be demonstrated,” he added. “So central London might not be the best first step… It’s difficult to put a number on it but maybe in a decade we will have commercial drone delivery in cities. That’s maybe reasonable.”
Kovac added that drone delivery will likely arrive sooner in other types of environments – principally where there’s more room for manoeuvre and fewer obstacles for drones to worry about. “Drone delivery in other areas such as in developing countries, such as Africa or Asia for example, there I think it’s much closer because there there is vast spaces and it could be much more feasible to test and implement something there.”
Nearer-term commercial applications for drones will focus on rather more mundane tasks — at least from a consumer’s eye view — such as inspection and repair of structures, he added.
“That is much more close,” said Kovac. “Already you can do 3D mapping of the environment [with drones], with something that is already on the market now — but the next step is the interaction with an environment. So anything that interacts with an environment, like sampling and flight in more constrained environments, like indoors, inside of mines, for examples, making 3D map of the mine structure, or making 3D map of buildings in different ways for the construction industry. These areas are much more close.”
Imperial’s incoming drone research lab
Earlier this month Imperial announced it will be building a shiny new drones research facility — due to open in 2017. Costing £1.25 million to build, the glassy structure will sit atop an existing building on its South Kensington campus so that students and others can peer up at drones being put through their paces and be inspired by the potential of the tech and the research being conducted. The drone lab’s visibility is absolutely intentional, says Kovac.
“The flight lab will be a very good nurturing ground for actually developing the flying robots. We do that already but it will leverage the capabilities we have already now. What it will be also providing us with is a very high exposure — so it will be a very visible VIP type facility that will be very visible and good for visitors and also to see how the research is done.”