CHAPTER 4
Delivery and Humanitarian Experimental Drones
Imagine you’re at home and hungry. You grab your computer, go online, and bring up the website of your favorite pizza place. You place your order. Twenty minutes later, your wait is over. A drone is hovering over your doorstep, and it drops a fresh pizza into your hands. Could drone delivery be common someday? Some experts think so. But there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done before that can happen.
In 2013 delivery company Deutsche Post tested deliveries of medicine with a drone in Germany.
Around the world people have experimented with using drones for delivery service. Businesses in Great Britain have tested a variety of delivery drones. In 2013 a London restaurant used drones to deliver sushi to customers at their tables. The same year a drone delivered pizza in a test flight near London.
The German delivery company DHL conducted test flights with delivery drones called “parcelcopters” in 2014. The drones delivered medicines and other needed goods to a remote island in the North Sea called Juist. They were some of the first European drones sent on a job outside the operator’s field of vision. However, operators on the ground were able to see where the drones were going using their onboard cameras.
Humanitarian Drones
In Africa companies are testing drones to see if they can deliver food, medicine, and other important supplies to rural areas. In sub-Saharan Africa, many of the roads are not passable during the rainy season. This problem keeps many people from getting needed supplies.
A company called Matternet is working with humanitarian organization UNICEF to test drones in Malawi. In 2016 Matternet’s test drone left a health clinic. It flew 6 miles (9.7 km) to a hospital. The drone carried fake blood samples. In the future Matternet hopes to carry real blood samples from newborn babies. The samples will need to be tested to see if the infants were born with HIV. Normally, the samples would be taken by motorcycle. This form of delivery is slow and expensive. A drone delivery system could be less costly and faster.
Matternet also hopes to someday use drones to deliver goods to people all over the world. It could let a person be both a sender and a receiver. For example, a person living in a rural village could receive goods from urban areas. Then the same person could load up the drone with homemade goods to be sold at an urban market.
A Matternet drone flies during a presentation in Switzerland in 2015.
Views from the Sky
The United Nations (UN) and aid organizations use drones to learn more about people’s needs. Drones surveyed disaster areas after the Haiti earthquakes in 2010 and the Balkan floods of southeastern Europe in 2014. The views from the sky were especially important to help send humanitarian aid. When a disaster happens, aerial images show exactly what is going on in the area. They show where the damage is and where the most help is needed.
Aerial images from drones can also show other types of crises. In 2016 drones surveyed the size of refugee camps in Syria. This information helped aid organizations learn how to best help the refugees.
A rescue drone flies in Lebanon in 2015. It is designed to find people who are drowning and throw a life preserver to them.