Bruce McPherson

Well, I don’t want to say, I told you so. But I told you so. Thomas Kirschstein from the University of Martin Luther Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, has discovered that city delivery drones operate at a similar efficiency to diesel vans.

That’s a bad thing. It’s 99% of the feel good story required to push for airspace grabs by large corporate companies.

In this paper an energy consumption model for drones is proposed to describe the energy demand for drone deliveries depending on environmental conditions and the flight pattern. The model is used to simulate the energy demand of a stationary parcel delivery system which serves a set customers from a depot. The energy consumed by drones is compared to the energy demand of Diesel trucks and electric trucks serving the same customers from the same depot.

The results indicate that switching to a solely drone-based parcel delivery system is not worthwhile from an energetic perspective in most scenarios.

A stationary drone-based parcel delivery system requires more energy than a truck-based parcel delivery system particularly in urban areas where customer density is high and truck tours are comparatively short. In rather rural settings with long distances between customers, a drone-based parcel delivery system creates an energy demand comparable to a parcel delivery system with electric trucks provided environmental conditions are moderate.

I am pro delivery drones, I live on a continent with an underdeveloped transport infrastructure with islands of untapped human potential unconnected.

Good news for #VertiportAfrica Drones are competitive in rather rural settings (large distances, low customer density).

The companies to watch in the drone delivery world are those plodding on, actually flying and refining their platforms.

Rendered images of nine winged 17 motored monstrosities being unloaded on a roof top with an insert of just how big the market is need not apply.