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Title    Drone Delivery is Live Today, and It’s 90% Cheaper than Car-Based Services
Date    Thursday August 19 2021, @06:46PM
Author    martyb
Topic   
from the what-about-snow,-rain,-heat,-or-gloom-of-night? dept.
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=21/08/19/1325249

upstart writes:

Drone Delivery Is Live Today, And It's 90% Cheaper Than Car-Based Services:

Amazon may be failing to deliver on its promises of drone delivery programs. But a home-grown Irish company is running live autonomous drone delivery right now in Galway, Ireland, has licenses to take it across the European Union, and is poised to — at the right moment — take its tech and knowhow across the Atlantic.

To Canada, at least.

Regulation in the U.S. is too far behind the times.

"We're delivering coffees," Manna CEO Bobby Healy told me in a recent episode of the TechFirst podcast. "We're delivering burgers and fries. We're delivering ice cream, broccoli, melon, you name it, we're delivering it. And it arrives perfect, you know, piping hot coffee, foam intact, little design on top of the foam still intact."

Manna is doing 2,000 to 3,000 flights a day using fully autonomous suitcase-sized drones that fly at 50 miles an hour — that's 80 km/hour in Ireland — at an altitude of 150 to 200 feet. Near your home, it'll scan the area with lidar and radar to find a safe spot, descend, drop off your delivery, and whiz back for its next pick-up.

[...] Each drone runs seven or eight deliveries an hour, and there's a huge advantage over an Uber Eats or Skip The Dishes style car delivery.

[...] "In the USA today, it's costing between $6 and $9 base cost to a platform to move product, to get product from restaurant to the store — or to the house," Healy says. "So think that key KPI, one person, roughly two orders per hour. One Manna personnel can do 20 deliveries per hour ... simple number, right? So our cost is one tenth the cost of using the road. It's literally that simple."

[...] it allows a tiny bookstore or pizza parlor in semi-rural Ireland to have a better delivery guarantee than global supergiant Amazon.


Original Submission

Links

  1. "upstart" - https://soylentnews.org/~upstart/
  2. "Drone Delivery Is Live Today, And It's 90% Cheaper Than Car-Based Services" - https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2021/08/18/drone-delivery-is-live-today-and-its-90-cheaper-than-car-based-services/
  3. "Manna" - https://www.manna.aero/
  4. "TechFirst podcast" - https://johnkoetsier.com/drone-delivery-is-here-right-now-live-for-real-and-its-awesome/
  5. "Original Submission" - https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=50746

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printed from SoylentNews, Drone Delivery is Live Today, and It’s 90% Cheaper than Car-Based Services on 2025-02-06 22:47:07