The workflow is a mixture of human and automatic labor. Once the drone supply system will get an order (clients order particular gadgets marked for drone supply within the firm’s app), a runner (human) goes to the eating places, all situated a couple of flights down within the shopping center, to select up the order and brings it to the launchpad. The runner locations the meals and drinks in a standardized cardboard field, weighs it to ensure it’s not too heavy, seals the field, and fingers it off to a distinct employee who makes a speciality of coping with the drones. The second employee locations the field underneath a drone and waits for it to lock in.
ZEYI YANG
Everything after that’s extremely automated, says Mao Yinian, the director of drone supply companies at Meituan. The drones’ actions are managed by a central algorithm, and the routes are predetermined. “You can know in advance, at every precise second, where each drone will be and how fast its speed is, so the customers can expect the arrival time with a deviation of two seconds, instead of three minutes or even 10 minutes (when it comes to traditional delivery),” he tells MIT Technology Review.
The firm has a centralized management room in Shenzhen, the place workers can take management of a drone in an emergency. There at the moment are greater than 100 drones that may be deployed for deliveries within the metropolis. On common, one operator is watching 10 drones on the identical time.
Not all human labor can or ought to be changed by machines, Mao says. But the corporate has plans to automate much more of the supply course of. For instance, Mao wish to see robots take over the work of loading packages onto drones and altering their batteries: “Our ground crew may have to bend over a hundred times a day to load the package and change the batteries. Human bodies are not designed for such movements.”
“Our vision is to turn the [launchpad] into a fully automated factory assembly line,” he says. “The only work for humans is to place the nonstandardized food and drinks into a standardized packaging box, and then there’s no more work for humans.”
Regulatory and financial constraints
Today, there are few technical obstacles left for drones supply of meals and packages, says Jonathan Roberts, a professor of robotics at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, who has researched drones since 1999. “We definitely can do reliable drone delivery, but whether it makes financial sense is a little bit hard to know,” he says.
Regulation typically determines the place firms select to arrange store. In 2002, Australia was the primary nation on this planet to introduce laws on unmanned aerial automobiles, as drones are technically referred to as. The legislation allowed universities and firms to conduct drone experiments so long as they obtained official licenses. “So [Australia] was the perfect place then to do testing,” says Roberts. That’s why Alphabet’s Wing examined and launched its drone deliveries in Australia earlier than attempting them in every other nation.
It was an analogous story for Meituan and town of Shenzhen, the place the municipal authorities has a powerful drone manufacturing provide chain and has been significantly pleasant towards the trade. On a nationwide coverage stage, the central authorities has additionally permitted Shenzhen, one of many nation’s designated Special Economic Zones, to have extra flexibility relating to business drone laws.