Introduction to Drone Delivery
Amazon was founded in the year 1994 as an online book seller, and at present it is the largest e-commerce company in the world. The company grew by leaps and bounds over the years and have been riding on the success charts by pushing and creating innovative product for the benefit of the community and the society. Drone delivery is another innovation of Amazon which started spreading its wings in the summer of 2016. The new and innovative drone delivery model at present is in the Beta testing mode, and can be used only in the flying duration of 2 hours hovering over the distribution centre of Amazon. However, the future of drone delivery looks extremely promising and it is a harbinger towards faster and better delivery of products to the customers. Jeff Bezos, the CEO and Founder of Amazon.com have extremely high hopes with his latest innovation. Jeff Bezos is of the opinion that drone delivery will not just expedite the delivery of the product and reduce a 48 hours of delivery time to just a couple of hours, it will also set a base for future experimentation with the technology to much greater use and further add innovation in the e-commerce industry(Shavarani et. al., 2018).
Drone delivery is one innovation which will address the customer pain point of late delivery of the product, drone delivery will address this problem effectively and push the envelope of technological revolution. Drone delivery will put the company on an upward trajectory and will create a sweet spot for the customers. Another problem which the drone delivery will address is reducing the most expensive and trouble worthy element of e-commerce, the delivery(Dorling, 2017). In the longer run, drone delivery will reduce the cost of delivery the parcel, reduce the dependence on the human resources and further experiment with the tech to create more sustainable solutions in the world. Holistically, drone delivery will improve the customer experience, customer satisfaction and would also benefit the large retailers to push their online sales by use of the technology. The modern day tech and the growing euphoria of the customers revolving around the drone technology which will boast their experience with the company is most definitely a viable concept which will soon make its way in the industry(Chang & Lee, 2018).
The company Amazon has been pushing its efforts to speed up and increase the efficiency of its shipping services. The company has created various algorithms which anticipate the orders of the customers, creating highly efficient robots which pick the items from the FC and a comprehensive service of Amazon Prime to pick the orders at the doorstep using the drone delivery. The project drone delivery was started a couple of year back in the year 2013 by the name of Prime Air. The Amazon started testing its drone delivery in UK after USA rubbished the request of Amazon to start testing of its drone delivery(Lin et. al., 2018). The company started development of an air-traffic control system to manage its fleet as the drones will move from the warehouse to the doors of customers. The drone delivery is going under an aggressive testing mechanism which is aimed at avoiding the collision between the drones and the nearby objects. The company is utilizing the collaborative technology of Geese to avoid and sense the obstacle in the path of parcel delivery. It is also mapping and tracking the location coordinates of the warehouse and the customer location to ensure the parcel is picked from the right place and is being delivered at the right location. Thus, extensive use of GPS technology is being used in the drone delivery. The company is further utilizing the concept of Machine learning and artificial intelligence to make the drones really smart and evolving on its own(Hong, Kuby & Murray, 2018).
Technological Developments
The control system is being newly designed for the drone delivery as the drones fly at a much lower height in comparison to the aircrafts. The drones will integrate the detailed maps along with information on the construction cranes and information on the weather conditions. Thus, the tech of Amazon is mostly based on the advanced use of GPS; Machine learning, Artificial intelligence, Geese and its collaborative communication tools (Burzichelli, 2016).
As mentioned earlier, drone delivery is at a very nascent stage and is still under the realms of the government and FAA regulation. However the company is not at the mercy of the US law regulators and is testing its drone delivery in Austria, UK and The Cambridge. Drone delivery is sure to cause disruption in the existing delivery ecosystem. As mentioned earlier Drone delivery will reduce the shipping time to just 4-5 hours for the initial delivery tie of 48 hours. It will also ensure that the delivery is as accurate as intended and results in assured delivery of product in the stipulated time(Kwon, Kim & Park, 2017).
The present times of delivery of a parcel to customers is heavily plagiarised by the inefficient human resources, high cost of delivery, time consuming process and occasional theft of the product. Technology is always aiding the society and the community and if harnessed in an efficient manner it delivers sustainable result for the organization. The definition of disruption aptly fits with the concept of drone delivery as the company is first targeting the segment of the customers which is mostly under looked. Drone delivery by the virtue of helping this low segment of customers will further develop and enhance the technology for much more efficient use, which will thus find a better adoption in the high end customer segment(Schenkelberg, 2016).
It has been estimated that nearing to 2020 the drone delivery will be functional in industry. This will create a disruption to the delivery logistics firms across the globe. The point here being that firms are looking to increase their profit margins by cutting on the high costs incurred towards the delivery of products. FedEx a shipping giant itself is testing automation to defend itself from the growing competition of Uber and Amazon. Thus drone delivery will set the customer expectation at such a high altitude that if other companies do not experiment and further add innovation to the drone technology; chances are that their business is going to suffer. Logistics Company across the globe is trying their hands on the technology in an effort to stay wary from the threat caused due to the drone delivery(Applin, 2016).
Disruption and Success
Thus, the last words on drone delivery can be summarized by saying that it is still at the mercy of the regulators, who would give a nod to the drone delivery program. But the Beta testing conducted by Amazon in US and the UK has been hugely successful, brightening the chances of the company to make drone delivery operational by early 2020.
Google has been long experimenting with Self driving cars and it still is experimenting with the technology to make it fool proof and not cause any potential threat to the travellers or the people moving on the road. Uber, which considers itself a tech company, was also experimenting with the concept of self -driving cars to reduce the cost of manpower, increase the efficiency of the taxi services and ensure no delay in the pick-up and arrival time. However, the company’s experiment with the technology to build a self-driving car faster than Google hit a roadblock when it hit a 49 year old pedestrian while crossing the road. This can be considered as one innovative failure which put the company under a lot of criticism at the hands of general public, tech enthusiasts and industry experts(Stilgoe, 2018).
There is no two doubts about the fact that self-driving and flying cars are innovation of the future, and most importantly sustainable solution for the densely populated world. At the same point in time, a lot of regulation, tech development and years of testing and R&D is required before the company can get into a prototyping mode, else the fate will be the same as Uber’s. The video footage of the accident also revealed some malpractices done by the company in the testing of the innovation. It pointed that the safety driver who was sitting in the car, exactly for the same purpose was not attentive which lead to demise of the 49 year old women(Griffin, 2018). This goes out to raise the concern about the testing systems being deployed by Uber and many other firms, who have been speeding up with their innovation practices to outsmart the existing competition. The innovation also points towards a research finding that human are extremely bad in being a part of the monitoring automation and they get easily disengaged which makes the testing and the results extremely dangerous(Mushtaq et. al., 2018).
Thus, it can be said that one such innovation which had the potential of putting Uber as the market leader in the taxi services failed the company and earned it a lot of flak. It is most unlikely to see if the customers or the stakeholders will go forward with investing in self -driving car technology.
References
Applin, S.A., 2016. Deliveries by Drone: Obstacles and Sociability. In The Future of Drone Use (pp. 71-91). TMC Asser Press, The Hague.
Burzichelli, C.D., 2016. Delivery drones: Will amazon air see the national airspace. Rutgers Computer & Tech. LJ, 42, p.162.
Chang, Y.S. and Lee, H.J., 2018. Optimal delivery routing with wider drone-delivery areas along a shorter truck-route. Expert Systems with Applications, 104, pp.307-317.
Dorling, K., Heinrichs, J., Messier, G.G. and Magierowski, S., 2017. Vehicle routing problems for drone delivery. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems, 47(1), pp.70-85.
Griffin, M.L., 2018. Steering (or Not) Through the Social and Legal Implications of Autonomous Vehicles. J. Bus. Entrepreneurship & L., 11, p.81.
Hong, I., Kuby, M. and Murray, A.T., 2018. A range-restricted recharging station coverage model for drone delivery service planning. Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, 90, pp.198-212.
Kwon, H., Kim, J. and Park, Y., 2017. Applying LSA text mining technique in envisioning social impacts of emerging technologies: The case of drone technology. Technovation, 60, pp.15-28.
Lin, C.A., Shah, K., Mauntel, L.C.C. and Shah, S.A., 2018. Drone delivery of medications: Review of the landscape and legal considerations. American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy, 75(3), pp.153-158.
Mushtaq, A., Riaz, S., Mohd, H. and Saleh, A., 2018, February. Perception and technology adoption trends for autonomous vehicles: Educational case study. In Advances in Science and Engineering Technology International Conferences (ASET), 2018 (pp. 1-5). IEEE.
Schenkelberg, F., 2016, January. How reliable does a delivery drone have to be. In 2016 Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium (RAMS). IEEE. ISBN (pp. 978-1).
Shavarani, S.M., Nejad, M.G., Rismanchian, F. and Izbirak, G., 2018. Application of hierarchical facility location problem for optimization of a drone delivery system: a case study of Amazon prime air in the city of San Francisco. The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, 95(9-12), pp.3141-3153.
Stilgoe, J., 2018. Machine learning, social learning and the governance of self-driving cars. Social studies of science, 48(1), pp.25-56.
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