Pizza Delivered By Drone - Commercial Drone Future Is Now

Rural dwellers rejoice – pizza delivery right to your door! As long as you don’t mind drones hovering outside your window.

Domino’s UK has teamed up with a drone company to deliver their product via unmanned aerial drone outside of London city limits. Delivery is traditionally restricted to within urban range of the local pizzeria, but no longer!

Watch as “DomiCopter” takes to the skies and delivers the pie to hungry customers:

Most recognize this for what it is – a clever marketing stunt with aspirations of going viral, and at this point it isn’t a truly viable means of getting product to customer.

For now there remain several stumbling blocks that mar the perfect pizza dream:

- Even small drones and quadcopters at present are DANGEROUS. The rapidly spinning blades are a serious threat to anything that might come into contact with them. How does the customer take the pizza from the drone? Carefully, one imagines.
[Police Drone Crashes into Police]

- The cost of any drone delivery service is going to be prohibitively high at this point. Included in the price of your pizza is undoubtedly the cost of investing in the high tech equipment and a qualified ’drone pilot foodstuff conveyance engineer’.

- As demonstrated in the video, the customer will have to actually DON PANTS and LEAVE THE HOUSE to get the pizza. This is unacceptable, and counter to the spirit of traditional home pizza delivery.

However, employing drones for commercial use is a big, booming business and will soon be a reality.

The BBC reported in 2012:

The skies open up for large civilian drones 

[…[Millions of pounds are being sunk into civilian projects – everything from border security to police surveillance and even transporting goods. 

This year the US Congress passed legislation giving US airspace regulator the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) until September 2015 to open up its airspace to drones, and Britain is expected to follow suit. 

The UK’s airspace regulator, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), has told BBC Newsnight that large unmanned drones could be flying in British skies by the end of the decade. 

The CAA has already handed out 120 permits to fly small, lightweight drones. By 2020 this may be extended to larger unmanned aircraft. 

“In aviation terms you can probably equate where we are with unmanned technology now to manned flight in 1918 or the early 1920s,” Gerry Corbett at the CAA said. 

“We’ve found them useful in war fighting and we can see the way ahead for commercial use.”
Large defence companies and small start-up firms are investing heavily in what many think could soon be a market worth tens of billions of pounds. 

Source

From Inhabitat:

Drones, or unmanned aircrafts, are becoming more common and more affordable — and as a result, they’re not just for the military anymore. To meet growing interest, the UK’s Civilian Aviation Authority will soon open the world’s first airport dedicated to drones, located in Southern Wales. 

The airport — a pimped-out version of the West Wales Airport — will feature a 4,100-foot runway and sit amid a 500-square-mile swath of airspace also reserved for drones. Currently, about 10,000 people live below the airspace. 

The expanded airport hopes to lure commercial firms who are developing drones. 

Source

Drones and robotics are making giant strides, and even though the commercial side of it is an attempt to make use of good, innovative, efficient tech, one cannot be blinded to the repercussions of drones over cities, towns, houses.

Once the realm of dystopian fantasy, ubiquitous surveillance will be reality.

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