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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

drone delivery

Amazon Unveils Its New Drone, Says It Will Start Making Deliveries “Within Months”

The battle to deliver your goods as fast as possible is taking to the skies. Amazon unveiled its new delivery drone today at its re:Mars conference in Las Vegas and said it would start delivering packages to people “within months.”

The first thing you notice about the fully electric drone is its unique design that combines elements of both a helicopter and an airplane. From the blog post announcing the drone:


It can do vertical takeoffs and landings – like a helicopter. And it’s efficient and aerodynamic – like an airplane. It also easily transitions between these two modes – from vertical-mode to airplane mode, and back to vertical mode.

The best way to get a sense of it is to watch this video (complete with soothing music) of the drone in flight:

Amazon Prime Air’s New Delivery Drone

Amazon’s drone can fly up to 15 miles and deliver packages that are less than five pounds (like a latte!) in less than 30 minutes.

The company is also touting the device’s numerous safety features. The propellers are completely shrouded and those shrouds acts as wings during flight. There are also numerous sensors, cameras and artificial intelligence on board so it can navigate unexpected obstacles or weather conditions during flight, as well as land safely in someone’s yard without running into wires or curious/agitated pets.

Amazon’s drone unveiling comes more than five years after Jeff Bezos first dropped the idea that Amazon was exploring drone delivery. It also comes just over a month since Google’s Wing Aviation got Federal Aviation Administration and Department of Transportation approvals to make commercial drone deliveries. Part of the reason they were able to do so was because Google basically went through the process of becoming a small airline. Amazon didn’t say where it was in the regulatory process, or where in the world it would be making deliveries, but the company does already know a thing about delivery by air with its fleet of 50 cargo planes.

In addition to Amazon and Google duking it out over drone dominance, look for an ecosystem of startups to spring up to help facilitate drone delivery. Already companies like AirSpace Link are providing services like route mapping for companies that want to do drone delivery.

Scoop: AirSpace Link Lets You Opt-in Your Address for Home Drone Delivery

While drone deliveries hold a ton of promise for tomorrow (burritos by air in just five minutes!), there are a ton of issues today that drone delivery needs to deal with. And a major hurdle for drone delivery will be the patchwork of state and local laws regulating where, when, and how many drones can fly in a given day.

AirSpace Link is a startup looking to help alleviate those and other administrative issues around drone delivery. The company came out of stealth mode today and launched its drone delivery registry, where people can register their dwelling or business as a location at which drone deliveries can be made.

There are actually four parts to AirSpace Link’s platform:

  • AirRegistry: Where people can opt-in or out of receiving drone deliveries at their home or place of business.
  • AirInspect: A service that handles all of the requisite city and state permitting for delivery companies in order to enable drone delivery.
  • AirNet: Working in conjunction with the FAA, AirNet creates a federally approved air route or “highway in the sky” for each drone delivery. These routes take into consideration things like schools and jails and other landmarks that must be avoided.
  • AirLink: An API that connects participating delivery services with the local governments and collects a fee that is paid to said local governments.

Now you should know that just because you register on AirSpace doesn’t mean that a drone will be dropping by your driveway any time soon. For now, the registry is a way to aggregate interest: Cities and companies alike can gauge how many people opt-in (or out) of drone delivery in various markets.  

Additionally, location registration must be completed manually (for now), with a person actually visiting a site to determine exact landing locations and make other assessments. Michael Healander, Co-Founder of AirSpace Link told me by phone that registry process will eventually be automated, and instead of a standalone site, opting in to drone delivery will be built into individual delivery apps.

Right now, local government rules around drone delivery are “all over the place,” according to Healander. To help cities get started with understanding and drafting drone delivery procedures, AirSpace Link offers a number of consulting packages for city and state governments ranging from $9,000 to $49,000. Eventually, AirSpace Link will also generate revenue through a SaaS model where fees are charged to the delivery companies.

Based in Detroit, MI, AirSpace Link incorporated in March of 2018 and soft-launched, running various tests with different government agencies and delivery companies throughout the past year. The company is founder funded, and Healander says they’re in the process of closing a round of venture funding right now.

Healander says the goal for AirSpace Link is to become a “neutral platform” that will connect any delivery service with any city and the federal government. The question will be how much control bigger companies like Amazon and UPS will want to give up in order to streamline future drone delivery operations.

Permits may be the less sexy side of drone delivery, but they are vital to its growth. Companies like Uber may be accelerating their drone delivery ambitions, but the fastest drones in the world can’t deliver your dinner if they are grounded by the government. Companies like AirSpace Link and AirMatrix, which provides similar air route mapping services, will be the bridge drones will fly over in order to bring you that burrito.

Burritos by Air Highlight Noisy Headaches Associated with Drone Delivery

There was a lot of chatter about drones this past year: Uber Eats is accelerating its drone ambitions, Zomato acquired a drone company in India, Amazon got a patent for in-flight drone recharging. There was so much activity that my colleague, Jenn Marston predicted that 2019 will be a big year for delivery by drones.

But as The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week, one Australian town is learning first-hand about the headaches that come with fast drone delivery. Wing, a division of Alphabet, has been testing out drone delivery in Canberra, Australia, flying everything from sunscreen to lattes through the air and depositing it safely at people’s homes.

Still in its infancy, drones have the potential to greatly speed up delivery of items like food, while using less energy and lowering costs. This is especially intriguing for low-margin, highly perishable items like food, which can lose freshness during long transit periods (see also: Soggy Food Sucks).

However, all that convenience comes at a noisy price. As The Journal reports, Wing’s drones have 12 rotors and two propellers making a chainsaw-like noise overheard. Multiply that noise by the number of people making orders and you have Canberra residents getting irritated by all that buzzing. The noise is wrecking calm and peaceful mornings, scaring dogs and keeping people from heading outside.

All this din is just one of the hurdles drone deliveries will need to overcome before they can become mainstream. Drones will also have issues with inclement weather and doing actual dropoffs in denser, urban areas where people don’t necessarily have a backyard. Then there is the whole issue of what regulations federal, state and local lawmakers pass that will ultimately determine where and how commercial delivery drones will be allowed to fly.

So far in Canberra there have been no accidents involving drone delivery. For its part, Wing says that it is changing up flight routes so drones don’t follow the same path each time, making the drones themselves quieter, and slowing them down to help appease residents.

2019 is going to be a key year for drone delivery, but it may wind up being the year we get through all the growing pains associated with the new technology. But like most innovations, get through it we shall, especially if there is the promise of Dro-nuts on the other side.

Zomato Acquires TechEagle Innovations for Drone Delivery of Food in India

Restaurant discovery and food delivery app Zomato announced yesterday that it has acquired drone developer and fellow Indian startup, TechEagle Innovations. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Zomato currently works with 75,000 restaurants to deliver food in 100 cities in India. With the TechEagle acquisition, Zomato plans to build out a network for aerial food delivery in its home country. Food delivery is playing an increasingly important role for the company, and has jumped to 65 percent of Zomato’s revenue in December from 35 percent back in January of this year.

Now the company is looking to take its food delivery business sky high. Literally.

In a press announcement (courtesy of The Hindu Times), Zomato Founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal said, “We are currently at the early stage of aerial innovations and are taking baby steps towards building a tomorrow wherein users can expect a drone to deliver the food they ordered online. We believe that robots powering the last mile delivery is an inevitable part of the future and hence is going to be a significant area of investment for us.”

Goyal’s words come just a couple of months after it was uncovered that Uber wants to greatly accelerate its own drone food delivery ambitions for Uber Eats, potentially coming to market as soon as 2021. And this summer, Amazon re-emerged in the drone delivery discussion with a patent for in-flight recharging of drones.

But up until this point, Uber and Amazon have been all talk–with good reason. Here in the U.S., regulations around drone and commercial drone operations have yet to be defined. Issues around where drones can fly, safety measures, noise ordinances and even infrastructure still need to be worked out. I’m not familiar with regulation in India, but Quartz reports that a pizzeria launched delivery by drone four years ago, only to have it abruptly halted by local authorities over permissions and security threats.

Four years is a long time in the tech world, and Zomato seems to be undaunted. Even if it is just “baby steps” at this point, the TechEagle acquisition is a concrete move towards food delivery flying overhead. Success in India, however, won’t guarantee global success, as Zomato will still have to navigate the patchwork of drone laws that will emerge in each country.

Uber Accelerating Its Drone Food Delivery Ambitions

Uber really wants to deliver your burger (or burrito, or whatever) by drone, and is accelerating its plans to make that happen. According to a story in The Wall Street Journal, Uber recently ran a job posting seeking a candidate who could get delivery drones up and running as early as next year, and commercially operational in numerous cities by 2021.

That job listing, titled “Flight Standards and Training,” has since been deleted, but it illustrates how serious Uber is about the food delivery space and its own ambitions within it.

The idea of drone delivery isn’t new, and Uber is among a number of companies including Alphabet (née Google) and Amazon looking to use drones for delivery. Amazon was recently issued a patent for in-flight recharging of drones, and even IBM has a patent for coffee delivery by drone based on your mood.

If successful, having its own fleet of drones could help push Uber’s food delivery business, Uber Eats, ahead of the pack in the fiercely competitive restaurant delivery sector. Uber Eats has been growing like a weed and is reportedly at a $6 billion sales run rate. But it faces competition from incumbents like GrubHub, which recently acquired Tapingo to snag college student customers, as well as upstarts like DoorDash, which has raised more than $780 million this year alone to expand its delivery operations (which probably will include drones).

Uber’s ambitions may run headlong into reality, however. Rules and regulations around drone deliveries still need to be worked out by the Federal Aviation Administration, as well as state and city governments. But as The Journal points out, Uber is eyeing a potential IPO next year that could value the company at $120 billion. Being early with drone deployment to boost its already successful Uber Eats division could help a positive narrative around its public offering.

And, of course, there is the question of whether people will want food delivered by drone, or towns will want fleets of drones constantly buzzing overhead.

Doritos By Drone? It Could Take A While

Across the skies in the U.S., delivery drones are a concept that holds great promise. This vision remains as an elusive scheme held hostage by regulators and uncertain implementations. Companies such as Amazon, Google, and even 7-Eleven are in the pilot and trial phases of drone delivery, as they test range, durability and payload of these flying, robotic carriers. A sign of domestic market uncertainty is that many of these early experiments are taking place on foreign soil.

Israeli-based startup FlyTrex is taking a different approach to the drone delivery opportunity. The company certainly has its eye on the food delivery down the road. While that space sorts out, FlyTrex is offering an out-of-the-box solution, complete with an API program, with potential appeal to markets beyond the culinary world with a focus on non-U.S. customers. Sensing the commercial use of drones for food and/or groceries is, at best, murky, the company has a deal in place with the Ukrainian postal authorities to soon test the delivery of small parcels via these unmanned, low-flying aircraft. FlyTrex hopes this is a first of many such trials.

While local governments in the US are moving quickly to pave the way for slow-moving (and safe) sidewalk delivery robots, delivery drones on the other hand are stuck in a frustrating loop of regulations that prevent the space from moving forward which, in turn, limits the technological progress of this mode of robotic delivery. As with many current legislative battles, regulating drones has become a fight between state and federal government.

“This could be a brave new world — and a cool way to get your stuff,” Minnesota’s U.S. Rep. Jason Lewis told Governmental Technology. Lewis is a Republican recently introduced bipartisan legislation to give the state, local and tribal governments’ jurisdiction over drones flying at 200 feet or lower. Lewis believes such a measure protects privacy and property rights while giving a boost to new technology.

The FAA is not keen on turning over drone regulation to local authorities. “If one or two municipalities enacted ordinances regulating [drones] in the navigable airspace and a significant number of municipalities followed suit, fractionalized control of the navigable airspace could result,” the agency wrote in 2015.

Despite obvious roadblocks, Amazon is undaunted in its pursuit of drone delivery. Given the amount of money the company has invested in the opportunity, as well as its pending purchase of Whole Foods, the supergiant retailer must explore every channel for efficiently getting goods from business to business and from business to consumer. Recently, Amazon has set up a research center in Paris to develop an air-traffic control system for drones as well as seeking a patent for cylindrical delivery hubs that work for drones and delivery trucks.

While there are plenty of sample videos detailing tests in various regions of the U.S., or tantalizing futurists with drones delivering beer, it may be years before we reach the viable intersection of food delivery and octocopters. In the meantime, the current zeitgeist for drone delivery is one that requires patience, a strong vision, and the resources to wait out multi pronged inertia.

Wanted: Robot Delivery Drivers

You’re sitting at home, enjoying a quiet Saturday when you hear a faint buzzing outside. You peer out the window to investigate, and the sound becomes more distinct, like the hum of a small motor. Suddenly, you hear a vague thud. You open the door and a box appears – your delivery has arrived. But there’s no delivery truck outside and no sign of any human being around. Chances are, you’ve just experienced your first robot delivery. Welcome to the future.

Robotic delivery – whether by land or air –  may be replacing your friendly UPS delivery driver, but it’s also creating its own unique set up jobs in the new economy. With big names like Amazon investing huge dollars and efforts into programs like Prime Air, the job of delivery truck driver might be cool again. Instead of driving around a large truck and walking door to door, robot delivery operators of the future will be sitting in a comfortable chair, miles away from the homes they’re delivering to, with a remote control and a set of complex maps and coordinates, creating routes for their robotic drivers – ground or air –  to complete.

Startups like Starship, an Estonia-based drone delivery organization created by Skype co-founders Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis, were recently hiring for drone delivery drivers. From the job description, Starship was looking for people to oversee a fleet of largely autonomous robots, create navigation paths and troubleshoot when the drone runs into an issue only human intelligence can solve.

“We are creating 99% autonomous robots, which means we outsource the difficult decisions to humans who are able to solve different social and traffic situations.”

Starship has some unique features that set it apart from other robotic delivery methods such as drones. For one, the unmanned vehicles are said to produce zero carbon emissions, and operate on the ground only, delivering in five to thirty minutes from any given local store. Starship says this is ten to fifteen times faster than alternative last-mile delivery methods like unmanned air crafts. And the company touts its combination of advanced driving software with actual humans to ensure that any obstacle or challenge are overcome. From their launch press release, “…navigation and obstacle avoidance software enables the robots to drive autonomously, but they are also overseen by human operators who can step in to ensure safety at all times.”

Starship robots are driven on the ground and sidewalk based – giving the robot operators unique challenges in keeping the bot safe from human interaction while en route. One of the things that Starship doesn’t mention is what happens to these land-bound vehicles if they encounter humans who try to interfere? We all know that one guy whose first reaction to seeing a robot delivery pod is to try to get in its way or mess with it in some manner. So essentially the job of an operator is to make sure the robots don’t mess up – or that some jerk on Essex Street doesn’t kick the bot onto its back like a helpless turtle.

Starship is looking for people who have a keen interest in technology and have the ability to stay alert while staring at a computer screen for hours at a time. Does this unique skillset sound familiar to any one group of humans? Perhaps the drone and robot delivery economy is carving out new career opportunities for video game enthusiasts. Sitting in a darkened room, diligently watching computer screens and mapping out paths and routes in case something goes awry sounds a lot like what gamers do every day in a variety of strategy-based scenarios. According to Statista, the number of active gamers worldwide? A staggering 1.78 million. That’s quite the applicant pool to choose from.

Land-bound robotic delivery is interesting; historically, federal and international regulations have made commercial drone usage challenging due to FAA requirements that companies have an operator with a pilot’s license and keep each drone within line of sight. In the U.S. this made it expensive and challenging to hire operators and use drones for everyday things like grocery delivery. Recent changes have relaxed these rules a bit and made air delivery for drones more possible. As for Starship – they have a unique advantage – their robots don’t need to fly.

The company began just two years ago and have already started testing their 30 beta robots in big markets from London to Seattle. How have they gotten so much done in such little time? According to a NextMarket podcast interview, Heinla said because they’ve focused on “creating basic sidewalk delivery robots” that move at a walking pace and don’t rely on computers to make every single decision, it was easier to create and test sooner. If any automation on the robot traveling at approximately six km/hour fails, its human operator can step in and complete the delivery without incident.

While automation technologies, artificial intelligence and robots may replace jobs in certain sectors – like food service and restaurants along with manufacturing and white collar industries, they’re also bringing with them different kinds of jobs. They might be less focused on brute labor and more on visual, spatial and technological skills – but certainly a trend to watch for those who predict job trends in the future. Meanwhile, Starship proves that robot technology that relies to a degree on human intelligence might have a shot at being first to market and to scale, while opening up a new kind of job in an AI-powered economy.