Drones

While looking through some old posts I found an early tweet with the following message

This may have been less than prescient as researching this week has shown the enormous progress in this area over the last five years.

Drones, UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) and AAV (Autonomous Aerial Vehicle) can be divided into two groups, ‘Deliver things’ and ‘Do things’. Recently a Drone taxi in Holland, collected Prince Pieter Christiaan and delivered him to the Amsterdam Arena, it had no pilot. While over at British Airways subsidiary IAG cargo, drones are busy counting the inventory in their Air cargo facility in Madrid.

Deliver things

We are seeing Pilot programmes and Proof of Concept models across the world driven by some of the key players in the global markets of transport, ecommerce and healthcare. In 2017 the US FAA invited Uber, Google (through Project Wing), Intel, Apple, FedEx, Microsoft, and AT&T along with drone industry heavies to participate in pilot projects including home delivery from Wing in collaboration with Wahlgreens which launched in 2019 and is still running today in Pilot mode. In 2020, UPS were awarded the first FAA approval to act as a ‘Drone Airline’ enabling them to operate anywhere in the US. To celebrate they launched a UPS CVS partnership to deliver medical supplies to Florida’s biggest retirement community with 135,000 potential customers.

Independently in China initial deliveries have been authorised for SF (China’s largest parcel carrier), Alibaba has also launched drone deliveries, alongside Antwork delivering Kentucky Fried Chicken, coffee and snacks and most recently DHL adding the capability to its parcel network. On a grander scale EHang are doing deals across the globe with the EH216 autonomous drone taxi and the creation of Urban Air Mobility zones in Spain, Norway, Austria and Qatar.

Drone technology is moving faster and faster as Drone’s even took centre stage at the World Economic Forum at Davos with a presentation from Zipline and panel with LLamasoft and Antwork on the future possibilities and requirements in the AAV market.

Zipline has been working in Rwanda and Ghana to ensure 95% of the countries medical centres are within a forty five minute flight time for the delivery of blood products and the craft have now flown over 2,000,000 operational kilometres. Their solution is an operating base with a stock holding of key blood and medical products, the drones are launched by catapult, fly to their designated location and release the delivery from low level by parachute to drop conveniently on the doorstep of the hospital or medical centre. The drone returns to base where it is plucked out of the air, watch this Zipline video to understand! So this only requires infrastructure at one end of the Supply Chain, as the range of the craft is 80km from its home base, two of these Logistical centres cover the majority of Rwanda, so two stockpiles of product and reduced challenges around expiration dates as goods held centrally can be dispatched and delivered within the hour to almost all the country, ensuring full availability in an efficient and sustainable end to end Supply Chain solution.

The recent breakthrough here in the U.K. came as the government have funded Solent Transport (£28m) to develop a ‘future transport zone’ including the development of an unmanned traffic management system (Air traffic control without pilots). This has commenced with the first delivery of supplies from the mainland to the Isle of Wight using a Windracers gas-powered Drone that operates like a small aircraft, taking off from Lee-on-Solent and flying five miles landing at Binstead airfield 18 minutes later. The expectation here is four deliveries per day to the Island up to the craft’s max capacity of 100Kg. This was a first for the UK that a non-military drone received permission to fly beyond visual line of site in the country. Such permissions will be critical to establishing meaningful drone delivery services globally. The constraint here is obviously the requirement for infrastructure and in effect a small-scale runway, associated with a transport solution at either end to collect from the source and deliver to the end location.

Elsewhere in the world Australia has just celebrated one year of home delivery with Wing (part of Alphabet) delivering in the Canberra area as a proof of concept, they have flown 20,700km delivering everything from hot coffee (2,000 cups) to baby food and toilet paper. These are battery powered drones that operate vertical take-off and landing but hover over their destination and lower their deliveries on lines to the waiting customers, thus requiring a minimal infrastructure set up. Also, in the port of Rotterdam recently a Network Switch was delivered by Dutch Drone Delta to a ship at sea to enable critical repairs, normally this would involve a boat or helicopter and place humans at risk, but dispatching a drone is once again cheaper, safer and more environmentally friendly.

These are all examples of the delivery opportunities and potential for drones, excluding the extensive and well documented operations within the military and defence sectors. The drone revolution is still hampered by the statutory regulations required to put a flying object into the sky alongside other flying objects, but as governments start to understand the opportunities that drones offer to deliver emergency medical supplies, household goods and even people in a swift, safe and environmentally friendly way, these barrier are being lowered and the drones are coming into land near you.

Doing things.

Warehouse 4.0 is the next incarnation of the logistical world. Just as other sectors are being changed fundamentally by technology, warehouses are no different. The combination of IOT, AI, RFID, autonomous robots and drones can influence key areas of warehouse operations, with a focus on inventory accuracy and safety benefits. Approximately 30% of logistic costs are tied up in warehousing, so any opportunity to use technology to improve margin, drive revenue and optimise safety will be welcomed, particularly at a time when people are in short supply and social distancing reduces effectiveness and productivity.

Non-productive hours are the first to be cut even though they could impact later in the product lifecycle. The inventory management requirements to ensure that stock is where the WMS believes it to be in the quantity expected. This has been a non-added value task as it is not picking, packing or shipping goods to a customer, so does not drive revenue, so let’s cut that out in the short term. Unfortunately, this sort of action will result in stock outs, short shipments and customer dissatisfaction. But if you could use a drone to perform the same function with a combination of technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence alongside RFID and Machine vision, then you would need reduced man hours, no requirement to close down operations, the drones can even be automated to run at night and self-charge.

What are the opportunities for drones in or outside a warehouse?

Cycle Count and Audit

Inventory search

Empty and full location verification

Item marking

Worker safety

Remote visibility

Order picking optimisation

Building Security and surveillance

These are generally non value added activities, they may save costs but do not add value to the customer experience.

In the current world the ability to track employees and ensure that they are keeping to the rules around social distancing can be controlled and managed by drones, at the same time they can be fitted with heat sensors to continuously measure staff temperature using thermal imaging systems to ensure the safety of all working in a warehouse or even retail environment. In China, this is being managed through drones on a larger scale outdoors to ensure social distancing rules are being obeyed, they even have the ability to call out to the public with ‘put your mask on’ or ‘that’s not two metres’ messages. The same is also happening in NYC, with drones from DJI flying up and down the East river calling out messages. In Memphis drones are running security at the airport, while across the border in Florida, they are being used to track mosquitos. Delta Drone alongside Geodis have also developed the SafeSprayBOT, which is designed to decontaminate and disinfect indoor spaces such as warehouses, factories and shopping centres, it autonomously sets off with its disinfectant tank and omni directional spray heads to complete the set task requiring no human intervention other than recharging and chemical refilling.

The use of drones, although a concern to some, think ‘Terminator’, have developed across a wide range of solutions, but all address the key facts of reduction of human interaction, cost savings and medical intervention. As the majority are electric or gas powered, they also tend to be environmentally friendly and sustainable if the power is from renewable sources. There you have it, in 2015 I was wrong, my only concern is now, I must revisit my other tweets and posts to check up on any other faulty predictions. The world is changing, and the technology is developing even faster in the current pandemic as new opportunities are being identified and developed in record time.

Happy to pop round later by taxi drone and discuss further………….

©EHang 216