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The Economics of Drone Delivery

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Re: The Economics of Drone Delivery

#31

Post by dmitriy_ko »

amelius wrote: post #30
dmitriy_ko wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and package delivery autonomous car can be made very small -- just big enough to carry the package. In fact, a ground-based autonomous delivery vehicle doesn't have to look anything like a car. Imaging an autonomous Segway-like 2-wheel cart. Segway is 4.5 times more efficient that Toyota Prius and 11 times more efficient than average American passenger vehicle.[1] Something like that would allow delivering packa…

If everything is really well orchestrated logistically, your Segway solution could attach (piggyback) to a bigger autonomous vehicle for a certain duration for greater efficiency, higher speed and bigger radius. Of course, the fuel costs will have to be split, but that is just a matter of making smart accounting software.

I like that idea -- for less time-sensetive deliveries you could have a "mothership" truck loaded with mini-vehicles drive to a neighborhood center and then release them. However, for things like food delivery where you want to deliver in under an hour, it will be better to just use mini-vehicles.

Re: The Economics of Drone Delivery

#32

Post by ChuckMcM »

desireco42 wrote: post #15

What we have here is kind of lack of imagination. There are at least 2 parts of delivery that I see can be worked on with drones. One is last mile delivery, that honestly is challenging, unless you live in suburban or rural area. However one, more interesting and probably lucrative part that should be easier to implement would be transport between major hub to nearby delivery point. Since these points can be built ou…

That is certainly an interesting point. Modern distribution centers use conveyers to move packages to the truck loading port where they will be loaded on to trucks for delivery. Why not extend the conveyer through the sky to a truck loading port a couple of miles away. If you lay out reliable ingress/egress channels for the drone traffic you could probably stack 300 - 400 drones per mile in that channel, operating all day would certainly expand the virtual "size" of your warehouse.

Re: The Economics of Drone Delivery

#33

Post by notahacker »

desireco42 wrote: post #15

What we have here is kind of lack of imagination. There are at least 2 parts of delivery that I see can be worked on with drones. One is last mile delivery, that honestly is challenging, unless you live in suburban or rural area. However one, more interesting and probably lucrative part that should be easier to implement would be transport between major hub to nearby delivery point. Since these points can be built ou…

The problems with the major hub to the delivery point are the same as some of those identified in the article: drones currently in operation don't have much carrying capability, and compensating for that with significantly more drones adds cost over a truck. Even if you scale your drones up to truck size and don't have any range limitations, you're carrying packages a similar distance whilst fighting gravity all the way. And if bottlenecks with sorting at each end and last mile are unchanged, the extra cost of cutting out trucks sat in traffic in the middle of the supply chain might make surprisingly little distance to delivery times.

Getting the FAA to approve airways for long distance autonomous commercial cargo transport without prohibitive fees sounds like a challenge too...

Re: The Economics of Drone Delivery

#34

Post by notahacker »

shawn-furyan wrote: post #12

Strange that an article with this title that talks so much about Amazon's drone efforts doesn't examine Amazon's relationship with the delivery industry. Amazon desperately wants to economically remove the time lag between buying something from Amazon and buying from the nearest Wal-Mart. Drones have the potential of significantly improving delivery times and costs in the long run, but the delivery industry has littl…

Cynics might suggest that even if situations where drones are the most commercially viable delivery solution prove to be limited, their putative threat adds to Amazon's negotiation power with their contractors...

Re: The Economics of Drone Delivery

#35

Post by seizethecheese »

mikeash wrote: post #19
baddox wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per pound of cargo I'm sure the delivery truck is way more energy efficient if it's relatively full.

Per pound per mile, I'm sure it is. But most packages get driven way farther than they need to be, since one truck is out all day dropping off packages. Per pound per delivery, I'd bet the truck loses.

Interesting. The counter-point to this would be that the drone needs to take a return trip for each package, whereas the delivery truck is able to "batch." Not sure which effect dominates.

Re: The Economics of Drone Delivery

#36

Post by rpercy »

shawn-furyan wrote: post #13

I've got to think that Amazon could rent out the roofs on commercial buildings throughout cities pretty cheaply. Doing so could completely moot the range issue as it would enable drone relays. I'm sure there will be regulatory barriers to doing that, but if they can get FAA approval for their delivery program as a whole, I'm sure they can get to a tipping point of municipalities that enable this sort of relay system.…

Agreed. Another possibility would be a hybrid approach with delivery trucks acting as mobile distribution centers. Trucks could be loaded with drones and packages, park in rural areas and let the drones take care of the last mile.

Re: The Economics of Drone Delivery

#37

Post by pj_mukh »

shawn-furyan wrote: post #13

I've got to think that Amazon could rent out the roofs on commercial buildings throughout cities pretty cheaply. Doing so could completely moot the range issue as it would enable drone relays. I'm sure there will be regulatory barriers to doing that, but if they can get FAA approval for their delivery program as a whole, I'm sure they can get to a tipping point of municipalities that enable this sort of relay system.…

That's precisely what Matternet (mentioned in the article) is planning! An internet...but for Matter. Sorry.

Re: The Economics of Drone Delivery

#38

Post by jchoong »

ams6110 wrote: post #23
ghaff wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that quick, low-price takeout delivery to a limited radius of households is pretty much a solved problem. I suppose one could imagine more industrialized takeout-only restaurants in suburban locations but, again,one could create such a chain today and indeed we have them for say pizza. They're not very good but they're big businesses.

If you could solve the problem of needing to directly interact with the customer to collect payment, I'd think food delivery would love the idea of drones. The biggest cost of a pizza delivery shop is paying the drivers. They normally get an hourly wage, plus mileage if they are using their own cars. They'd need to solve payment collection; a lot of people still pay cash for things like food delivery.

This "They'd need to solve payment collection;" is an intriguing problem if it is still present. The spate of startups (doordash/postmates/et.al) solves the problem (and more) but I certainly wonder if there's a more focused solution to the specific problem. Would there happen to be more specific details/datapoints?

Re: The Economics of Drone Delivery

#39

Post by rdlecler1 »

Driverless trucks as distribution centers/battery swaps, and rooftop drone stations, could bring this down to last meter delivery, rather than last mile delivery. You just need delivery from curb to door step which a truck can now do and multiple drones can be delivering packages at one time.

Going to back-of-the-napkin this here: Current cost (just for person making the drop) is about $1.50/stop. Assume six packages/stop. So now you just need six drones to fly a single package from a truck to the doorstep for $0.25/each in that stop. So each drone will need to make 120 such runs/day for under $30.00 ($150/week, $7,800/year). This should be enough to easily cover energy/CAPEX as I assume that drones would be operating autonomously, and maybe you'd need one override-pilot in a support center for every 100 drones (basically one manual override every 17 stops).

Given the sanity check above, I'd wager that you could easily get this down to $0.05-$0.10 per package, including edge cases covering 99% of the deliveries. Big deliveries like TVs may ask the owner to come out to the (driverless) truck to pick it up at the side of the road while a drone century waits.

Re: The Economics of Drone Delivery

#40

Post by desireco42 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #32
desireco42 wrote: post #15

What we have here is kind of lack of imagination. There are at least 2 parts of delivery that I see can be worked on with drones. One is last mile delivery, that honestly is challenging, unless you live in suburban or rural area. However one, more interesting and probably lucrative part that should be easier to implement would be transport between major hub to nearby delivery point. Since these points can be built ou…

That is certainly an interesting point. Modern distribution centers use conveyers to move packages to the truck loading port where they will be loaded on to trucks for delivery. Why not extend the conveyer through the sky to a truck loading port a couple of miles away. If you lay out reliable ingress/egress channels for the drone traffic you could probably stack 300 - 400 drones per mile in that channel, operating al…

That is pretty much how I would envision it. Once you build that, suddenly another level of things that we can't even imagine today are becoming available.

Plus ecologically would probably be very good and less trucks on the roads.

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