Originally posted on LinkedIn in February 2017.
Let’s talk about practicality — this is hard to admit for an avid aerospace enthusiast like me — and engage in a cold mind rational thinking exercise.
The hype for Unmanned Aircraft Systems, that you may know as “drones”, is climbing to the summit of the so called “Peak of Inflated Expectations”. They are enjoying a great wave of success since electronics miniaturization, wireless transmission advances and battery improvements have allowed for consumer products to be mass produced at a very affordable price. I own one of those “drones” myself, simply because it’s more fun to remotely control an object that flies, rather than an object on the ground.
The hype for Unmanned Aircraft Systems, that you may know as “drones”, is climbing to the summit of the so called “Peak of Inflated Expectations”.
At the same time, other drones keep their feet on the ground. And it seems a much wiser choice today. I’m talking about unmanned terrestrial vehicles that transport goods autonomously. Companies like Piaggio, Starship and Dispatch, must have thought similarly to me.
Piaggio, that you may know as the producer of the Vespa scooter and the Avanti executive aircraft, has launched an American-based upstart offshoot called Piaggio Fast Forward. This startup’s first project is a lightweight delivery system called Gita, which means “trip” in Italian.
The aforementioned competitors, Starship and Dispatch, offer comparable products. The keywords “personal courier” and “sidewalks and pedestrian spaces” explain very clearly what primary problem is being addressed: densely populated area congestion.
Those kind of Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) should be the main focus of capital investment and entrepreneurs, as of today. It is way more practical of a solution than to dispatch UAS for last mile delivery. And I hope that the reason why UAS development receives considerably more resources is not just hype.
Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) should be the main focus of capital investment and entrepreneurs.
Allow me to explain. First, land transport infrastructure is established and able to host UGVs, while airspace management is not ready to accept self-flying vehicles today. Think about Tesla, Otto and other self driven vehicles which will soon roam city streets and highways without a human driver. Their engineers need the vehicle control system to replicate (or better) a human driver, however they do not need to worry about changing the current street layouts and parking lot designs. It is a different story with UAVs, because aircraft separation is a critical aspect of flying and the current procedures and laws don’t encompass the presence of many small UAVs. If there was some hope, the FAA NextGen airspace management system, which will allow easier traffic separation and individually tailored routing, is not being implemented any soon. So UAV delivery system companies need to fight a lengthy uphill regulatory battle just to have access to the air infrastructure, before they are even allowed to put their products at use.
Second, risk management. UGVs on a sidewalk can break down at any time without any safety concern, but a worst case scenario involving UAS falling off the sky would pose a considerable safety hazard, especially in densely populated areas where they are more needed.
Third, UAS have progressed fantastically in the recent past, and I am delighted by such a technological marvel. But we are still at the point where payloads and ranges are a limiting compromise. Batteries are heavy and eat into the payload allowance, so more range means less payload. Best case scenarios allow for a few pounds to be carried for a dozen miles. Whereas the same energy spend to “roll a cart” through a city and into a building would improve performance by one order of magnitude in either distance or payload. It may be a bit slower, but again the ultimate goal should be to solve congestion and allow humans to better jobs than driving a delivery truck.
Fourth, UAG are easier and cheaper to develop, build and run, reducing their time to market and operating cost. Simple.
Whether it is better for humans to devote more resources to UAVs than UGVs today, is purely a question of context. Some applications should be prioritized, for example delivering medicines in rural inaccessible areas or aerial reconnaissance of hazardous environments. But in most cases otherwise, I observe commercial reasons driving the UAV development efforts, without any real problem being solved. In other words, do we really need burritos to be air dropped in a country plagued by obesity? Don’t we have bigger problems to solve?
This question about ground or air, reminds me of the famous Negroponte Switch, where the debate was about what information should travel by cable (ground) and what other should be wireless (air). Negroponte initially predicted that the rise of mobile devices would push away other media from the wireless realm to cable connections. But eventually he corrected the aim by accepting a coexistence of the two, as long as distance is taken into account. Hence our home WiFi and phone Bluetooth do not exclude satellite TV.
Similarly, I predict that we will inevitably have a mesh network of ground and air autonomous delivery systems. And I am quite looking forward to that.
But please, let’s get the ground delivery sorted first.
P.S. It is worth mentioning that some indoor delivery systems are getting quite useful. For example I spotted the TUG robots at Mission Bay UCSF Hospital, a fleet of robots hauling food, medications and other stuff around the facility. Not bad at all, although not quite smart yet. I found it fairly easy to induce a deadlock traffic situation.
My reply to a commenter asking about the “Uber style UAV cab drones in Dubai”, follows. I am excited to see thing fly, in general. But this one looks more like a marketing exercise, where Dubai is lining up a series of headline stealing news to ramp up awareness and prepare media and public opinion for the 2020 Expo. More specifically, this aircraft (http://www.ehang.com/ehang184/) is worth about 250,000 USD and it will surely need a lot of energy to fly a 200 pounds payload for dozens of minutes. And take quite some time to recharge. Let’s not even talk about maintenance requirements. And lack if infrastructure (landing pads, ATC, etc). The term of comparison is a car that costs an order of magnitude less and does not need long refuelling breaks and maintenance stops. It is meant to be a short hop of a luxury experience to cut above traffic. It is definitely not solving the congestion problem, nor any other problem I’m aware of. More generally, in Dubai cars are needed because of extreme weather and lack of pedestrian infrastructure. With a more capillar metro system, better walkways and other de-congestion measures, the traffic problem would be reduced to a point where this aerial service was almost rendered useless.