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Switzerland Begins Postal Delivery by Drone

posted by martyb on Thursday July 09 2015, @03:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the drones-going-postal-doesn't-sound-too-good dept.

yarp writes:

The Guardian is reporting that the Swiss postal service has started testing delivery of parcels by autonomous drones.

"The drone has an extremely light construction and is capable of transporting loads of up to one kilo over more than 10 kilometres with a single battery charge," Swiss Post said in a statement.

Swiss Post see drones being in commercial use in about 5 years' time if the trials prove successful. Could this set a precedent for delivery-by-drone elsewhere in the world despite other proposed services (e.g. Amazon's) facing stiff regulation?

Have any Soylentils in Switzerland been on the receiving end of one of these deliveries or seen a drone going about its business?

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by bradley13 on Thursday July 09 2015, @08:46AM

    by bradley13 (3053) on Thursday July 09 2015, @08:46AM (#206875) Homepage Journal

    I'm also in Switzerland. This is something that this post has just started testing, as in, flying drones around an empty field carrying packages. They aren't delivering to actual customers yet.

    According to the news report the other day, they expect that it will mostly be useful in rural areas. Why drive your mail truck 10km up a twisting road to deliver one isolated household, when you could just send a drone. There's not much detail at all - likely the post also doesn't yet really know what they want to do with these things.

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  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday July 09 2015, @10:07AM

    by TheRaven (270) on Thursday July 09 2015, @10:07AM (#206895) Journal
    It also probably depends on how cheap they can be made. If you're delivering a few parcels to a small town, then driving the delivery truck to the edge of the town and having the drones handle the last few miles is probably quite a big saving in terms of time, but it would depend on being able to have a few dozen drones in the van.
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