Delivery of goods by drones can cost 20 cents.
Professor Rafaello D'Andrea of the Swiss Higher Technical School in the collection of scientific articles IEEE Automation Science and Engineering published the results of his study on the economic viability of using drones to deliver goods. After analyzing the various components of such a cost, the professor concluded that for companies whose business components include the delivery of goods, the price of such a service may be about 20 US cents.
The competence of the scientist in this area is beyond doubt: he is one of the main consultants of the Flying Machine Arena project, and also the co-founder of Kiva Systems , a robot company for e-commerce, which was bought by Amazon in March 2012 for $ 775 million.
Suppose that the flight distance for delivery is no more than 10 km and the payload of the drone (actually, the load) will not exceed 2 kg: many consumer goods fall into this range, including the beaten-up example - pizza. After making a few more assessments regarding the technical parameters, the professor concludes that delivery in this way will cost only about 10 cents in terms of the cost of energy spent on the flight, which cannot but be considered advantageous, even very roughly estimating the cost of delivering pizza on an ordinary car with ICE .
On the other hand, if you take into account the cost of the drone itself at about $ 1000, add maintenance costs at 20% of its cost per year and determine the depreciation period at 5 years, you can get an estimate of the cost of delivery of the cargo at 20 cents, which is still an order of magnitude less than Amazon pays now: from $ 2 to $ 8 per unit of cargo. Then, if we recognize the professor's estimate as correct, then for Amazon, the savings could be a fantastic figure of $ 3.538 billion at 2013 prices.
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In fact, of course, everything is not so simple and there are a number of complex problems that have not yet been completely resolved. For example, really accurate navigation in urban environments, taking into account all possible situations in flight (if you assume the drone is completely autonomous) or the scenario of delivery to the apartment building of the same pizza require development, and perhaps the price of delivery will need to be adjusted upwards.
The competence of the scientist in this area is beyond doubt: he is one of the main consultants of the Flying Machine Arena project, and also the co-founder of Kiva Systems , a robot company for e-commerce, which was bought by Amazon in March 2012 for $ 775 million.
Suppose that the flight distance for delivery is no more than 10 km and the payload of the drone (actually, the load) will not exceed 2 kg: many consumer goods fall into this range, including the beaten-up example - pizza. After making a few more assessments regarding the technical parameters, the professor concludes that delivery in this way will cost only about 10 cents in terms of the cost of energy spent on the flight, which cannot but be considered advantageous, even very roughly estimating the cost of delivering pizza on an ordinary car with ICE .
On the other hand, if you take into account the cost of the drone itself at about $ 1000, add maintenance costs at 20% of its cost per year and determine the depreciation period at 5 years, you can get an estimate of the cost of delivery of the cargo at 20 cents, which is still an order of magnitude less than Amazon pays now: from $ 2 to $ 8 per unit of cargo. Then, if we recognize the professor's estimate as correct, then for Amazon, the savings could be a fantastic figure of $ 3.538 billion at 2013 prices.
')
In fact, of course, everything is not so simple and there are a number of complex problems that have not yet been completely resolved. For example, really accurate navigation in urban environments, taking into account all possible situations in flight (if you assume the drone is completely autonomous) or the scenario of delivery to the apartment building of the same pizza require development, and perhaps the price of delivery will need to be adjusted upwards.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/363991/
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