By Jack Nicas And Greg Bensinger
Companies hoping to use drones to deliver small packages are
confronting technical hurdles such as battery life and weather that
are at least as vexing as proposed U.S. regulatory limits.
Retail and shipping companies including Amazon.com Inc., Alibaba
Group Holding Ltd., and Deutsche Post DHL AG have been among the
most enthusiastic supporters, seeing drones as potentially
transforming their businesses.
But hurdles including short battery life and unreliable location
data suggest it could be years before armies of drones replace
FedEx and UPS vans. Companies also face obstacles such as bad
weather, aggressive birds and gun-toting drone opponents
Delivery drones "are absolutely viable, but there are a lot of
technical hurdles that have to be crossed," said Nicholas Roy, a
robotics professor at the Massachusetts of Institute of Technology
and the former head of Google Inc.'s drone-delivery project. "We
are very much in the prototype stage."
The top two U.S. private package delivery companies think drone
delivery won't fly soon. FedEx Corp. and United Parcel Service Inc.
say the technology remains far from being market ready. "There
remain numerous reasons why drones are not a feasible delivery
technology at this time," UPS said last month.
Experts say the most pressing challenge to deliveries is drones'
battery power. Like makers of laptops, smartphones and electric
cars, drone makers still need to pack more energy into smaller
batteries. The issue is especially acute for delivery craft: the
heavier the package, the more power is needed to fly.
Amazon wants its drones to be able to carry 5-pound packages on
a 20-mile round trip route. That performance is almost certainly
impossible today with the eight-rotor prototype Amazon demonstrated
in late 2013, said Raffaello D'Andrea, a robotics professor at the
engineering university ETH Zurich and co-inventor of the robots
that help sort Amazon's warehouses.
An alternative is the approach Google unveiled last August--a
hybrid drone with propellers and wings that takes off like a copter
and glides like a plane, increasing efficiency. Yet that design is
generally less wind-resistant, agile and reliable than a copter
drone. Indeed, Google this month said it scrapped that initial
design because it was too difficult to control.
Amazon this week received approval from the Federal Aviation
Administration to test its drones outdoors. The company has
developed nearly a dozen aircraft as part of its Prime Air project.
"We're testing a range of vehicle capabilities," Gur Kimchi, Amazon
Prime Air vice president, said in a statement. "We won't launch
Prime Air until we are able to demonstrate safe operations."
Experts say a trickier challenge is ensuring drones can make
deliveries without incident almost 100% of the time. Delivery
drones must be cheap to be commercially viable, developers say, and
exceptionally reliable to pass muster with regulators and the
public.
"A sea change is going to be required in how these vehicles are
designed and manufactured to support moving from a hobbyist flying
on the weekend in a park to a 24/7 delivery service flying over
your highways," said Mr. Roy.
Then there is how to drop off a package. Some companies have
tested landing on a customer's doorstep while others have tried
lowering packages down on a line. But global-positioning-system
data can be inaccurate--enough to put a drone at the wrong house or
over a swimming pool.
A person familiar with Amazon's thinking said that to simplify
delivery, its drones could deliver to storage lockers, accessed
through a code sent to customers.
And delivery drones would have to fly autonomously, which
requires sensors and software that can three-dimensionally map the
environment and navigate it on the fly. Such technology isn't yet
ready, though a handful of companies, including chip makers Intel
Corp. and Qualcomm Inc. say they're getting closer to solving
it.
If and when these technical limitations are overcome, regulators
might not allow drone deliveries. Last month, the FAA proposed
rules that would require one pilot to monitor each drone, limiting
flights to within sight of the operator, and barring flights over
bystanders. The agency said the proposed rules, which are expected
to be completed next year, wouldn't allow drones carrying an
"external load."
The FAA said it would likely allow drone flights beyond
operators' eyeshot if companies demonstrate reliable
collision-avoidance technology. It is unclear if the agency would
consider authorizing large-scale autonomous drone operations
overseen by just a few humans, as companies currently envision.
Still, companies are zooming ahead. Amazon and Google are
working on drones that could deliver small packages in less than 30
minutes. A DHL drone has delivered medicine to an island in the
North Sea, and Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant, last month
delivered tea with drones.
"The technology is challenging, but totally doable," Amazon
Chief Executive Jeff Bezos said last year.
Mr. D'Andrea, the robotics expert, predicts the technology for
large-scale drone deliveries would take about five years to
develop.
"People underestimate the technical difficulties.... Folks watch
videos on YouTube and think, Wow, this is great. Why isn't somebody
delivering my pizza?" Mr. D'Andrea said. "It takes time and effort
to make something the public doesn't have to think twice
about."
Write to Jack Nicas at jack.nicas@wsj.com and Greg Bensinger at
greg.bensinger@wsj.com
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