A Cincinnati firm has overcome the main obstacle in the race for drone deliveries by launching them out of the roof of a truck.
Workhorse, an American company, has created a system called HorseFly that meets the latest, more flexible rules of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Indeed, to fly its drones, operators need to obtain a commercial drone pilot’s license, the unmanned aerial vehicles have to be flown during daylight at no more than 400 feet off the ground, and must remain visible to the operator at all times.
Amazon.com has been actively pursuing drone technology to get packages to consumers, but the line-of-sight requirement has constrained its goal so far of using remote control to deliver packages miles away from the origin warehouse.
Workhorse has developed an eight-rotor « Octocopter » called HorseFly designed to be used in tandem with its electric delivery trucks, some of which are in service with companies like FedEx and UPS. Workhorse’s Octocopter can travel at speeds of 50 miles per hour, can carry a package weighing up to 10 lbs. and fly continuously for a period of 30 minutes. It has the ability to fly from the roof of the delivery vehicle, climb to a safe height, then navigate to the desired point of delivery using GPS navigation. The idea behind the concept of Workhorse is tackling the last mile delivery. Places where trucks and vans can’t reach such as rural areas for example.
Workhorse’s solution has been to place these drones to launch out of trucks because they remain within sight of the driver. Steve Burns, chief executive of Workhorse said that the drones remain within the line-of-sight of the truck drivers.
« We launch from atop the truck, and efficiencies are not as good as if you could just launch from 30 miles away, but they are staggering, » Burns told CNBC in a TV interview on Thursday.
The idea is to let the driver, using a touchscreen interface in the delivery truck, make a last mile delivery to a residence that is further from a cluster of other consignees. If the driver has a handful of deliveries in one direction and one to the left, “Give the one to the left to the the bird,” he said.
“Somebody has to be viewing it, whether it’s in the passenger seat of the truck or in the early days we think we’ll have the driver just sit there and watch it – which isn’t the economies of scale, isn’t the efficiencies you’d like to see yet, but we’re ushering in something that could be as dramatic to the delivery of goods as the invention of the internal combustion engine,” Burns said. “At 2 or 3 cents a mile, which is the electricity these drones use, the efficiencies are just remarkable.”
Burns said Workhorse plans to be flying drones in real-world operation by the end of the year.