Mumbai Restaurant Delivers Pizza by Drone

> As an ad for the pizza company, it works well though given how much this video seems to have been shared.

I was exhibiting at a UAV conference back in November, at there was a guy from Hootsuite exhibiting for the conference next door.

He spent quite some time trying to convince me that we should be working with pizza companies on an advertising campaign involving UAV delivered pizza. He was right, it's a good 'viral' ad idea.

Well, to be fair, they also flew past someone playing cricket, chowpatty and what I think was byculla. That's a fairly circuitous route, but I guess they didn't want the pizza to be too hot when it landed.

Straight to the point my friend. I completely agree with you!

Also there was no demonstration of they input their data in an automated system that guides the drone through a GPS... It could just be them guiding it with a remote control just to create the Ad.

> it didn't seem automated in any real sense.

From the GPS/Compass mount and the flashing LED I think its a pretty safe bet that it's a NAZA flight controller, which doesn't offer any autonomy (beyond stabilisation and GPS assisted position hold). So someone is flying it by remote control, like any RC aircraft.

That it's a thin ad and little more probably tells us why previous submissions got little traction.

Another problem we'll have initially is safety. Drones might pretty cool and useful, until one drops from they sky and mauls pedestrians or vehicles.

So, at least in areas with a lot of people, the same places where small drones can be very useful, there needs to be quite a large built in safety. This means encrypted communication for drone control, resilience for radio jamming, quite a lot of built in autonomous abilities to handle anomalities. And probably some big physical changes to lower potential damage. Don't underestimate the damage small fast spinning propellers can do.

Initially this might mean drones either get banned, or get banned after the 1. incident, slowing down adoption and increasing cost to make them safer.

I think both can easily be addressed by having flight corridors - much akin to virtual roads in the sky. It does take away some of the freedom / versatility / ability to go as the crow flies; but would ensure a degree of safety / sanity.

Not necessarily. How fast does a drone fly - will it always be faster than a moped, especially on a short, direct route? Also, more significantly, what's the maximum weight a drone can realistically carry? A moped can carry several pizzas at once for delivery to multiple addresses. Plus 'awkward' orders (litre bottle of soda?) aren't really catered for by drone, as far as I can tell.

Not totally dismissing the technology - drones obviously have great future potential and, hopefully, are ultimately far better for our environment - but not convinced that takeaway delivery is a suitable use case.

In an urban area? I doubt it. Sure, the pizza delivery guy has to deal with car traffic, obstacles, and pedestrians. But the last 100 meters s/he has to enter a PIN to get into my building. Then has to be buzzed in. Finally has to scale 4 floors.

The UAV that can do all of that hasn't been engineered yet and won't be cheaper than a part-time college student.

At this stage UAV propulsion is quite primitive. Their fixed-pitch blades don't compensate with changes in the environment well. While this is not a problem for small hobby/camera drones large, cargo carrying drones will have real problems compensating on a windy day.

The collective-pitch mechanisms in modern helicopters and VTOL are marvels of engineering (read $$$). The reason they are used is to allow large lifting bodies to change thrust without changing rotational velocity.

It could be heated up for you by a Predator drone.

Where is the step forward? The drone requires a skilled pilot to fly it. The drone cannot knock on doors. It cannot navigate stair cases. The recipient is inconvenienced and must stand in an open place to receive the pizza.

This is going to come off as abrasive (out of context it sounds pretty bad), but:

I've never understood why progress should be sacrificed because 'someone loses a job.'

Idealistically, this indicates a problem with society - that people have to keep toiling away at automatable jobs for the sake of earning enough to live on.

Practically, this is going to happen at some point sooner or later once it becomes commercially profitable to do so and enough players are in the market.

Some of the greatest inventions have come out of the most meaningless original intentions. To play devil's advocate, maybe using drones for food delivery could eventually lead to finer-grained drone control - surgeries might very well be drone-assisted in the future!

Oh noes, robots are stealing our jobs. I wonder how did we ever gotten off from hand picked cottons, horse-n-buggy, and all that time-consuming manual labor of olds.

How did a luddite ended up on a tech forum anyway? Did someone fixed the irony device? He could've at least waited to read this news from the good old newspaper to support his local economy.

The best guess answer to that is making it so everyone doesn't have to work unless they want to via a citizen's income http://www.citizensincome.org/

That drone means more drone manufactures, more efficient traffic, less co2, more free time and more artists.

Although, in this case: it probably means one more RC-drone controller and not much else.

I find it appalling that you're using the Internet to transmit your message. Have you no thought for the poor mail delivery people?