Delivery drones could get further by taking the bus. By landing on public transport, the flying vehicles could travel four-and-a-half times as far, making them more useful for carrying packages over longer distances.
Drones are agile, fast and energy-efficient, but their measly battery life means they can鈥檛 fly for long 鈥� considerably less than an hour for most consumer models. That鈥檚 a problem if you want to use them to deliver packages across a large city.
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To address this, researchers at Stanford University in California devised a computer program that plans deliveries by getting drones to piggyback on buses for a range boost.
鈥淲e already have this existing, generally decent infrastructure for most good cities and we鈥檙e just benefiting from that,鈥� says Shushman Choudhury, who led the research. 鈥淵ou could now service deliveries over a city while having far fewer depots.鈥�
The program has two layers 鈥� the first decides which drones should deliver which packages and the second sets the route each should take and when they should hop on and off buses.
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In simulations of San Francisco and the Washington DC area, the software typically routed all packages in a few seconds and hitchhiking boosted drone ranges by up to 450 per cent. The largest simulation involved 200 drones delivering 5000 packages using a bus network with 8000 stops on it.
The research doesn鈥檛 deal with practical considerations like noise pollution, reliably landing drones on buses and public transport delays, admits Choudhury, but these are being tackled by other researchers.
A bigger challenge may be regulation. In the US, drones are governed by the Federal Aviation Administration while the Department of Transportation controls public transit, and satisfying both regulators simultaneously could be tricky, he says.
鈥淓xploiting predictable, existing traffic flows is smart,鈥� says Niels Agatz at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. However, transit networks in many urban areas wouldn鈥檛 be extensive enough or fast enough for this system to work, he says. Without regular buses that stop frequently, it would be hard to rely on public transit to make timely deliveries across most of a city.
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