How could they be overseen from an air traffic standpoint? Or policed so they couldn’t be co-opted for terrorist activities (i.e., some independent player planting something on some branded drone - the company not involved in any way in the bad stuff…)
What about folks trying to shoot them down - as a prank or to hurt their business?
How could they deal with accidents? Pizzas falling from the sky, collisions, etc.
I mean, this will never be something that could happen, right?
Or, put it another way: is there a set of challenges that: a) could be addressed IRL; and b) could enable drone-based consumer services to actually be viable/implement-able?
Probably a more legitimate concern is noise and safety. People probably don’t want RC drones whizzing around their neighborhood making an awful racket. And I’m more worried about one landing on someones car or crashing into a person than I am about terrorism or people shooting them down.
There’s new tech that’s being added to table saws that shorts the machine out when the blade comes in to contact with…meat (it works for both hot dogs and fingers). This tech could be applied to the blades of the choppers. That doesn’t help tall trees and power lines but it could keep curious mammals of all types from being decapitated.
I doubt they’re military sized drones; probably more like radio-controlled airplanes or helicopters than anything else.
I’d think that road drones (autonomous vehicles) are more likely in the long run- that requires a lot less GIS accuracy, and processing power, once the driving part is taken care of. Basically it’d drive up, give your phone a call and say it was out front, and give you a code to type in to get your pizza.
That sounds far more plausible. I really have difficulty envisioning what would need to be in place to enable small drones to fly all over a city or town. Autonomous vehicles take advantage of decades/centuries of development regarding use of roads and how road systems “fit” into cities and towns. We have similar structures in place for air space with regards to planes, and even 'copters in big cities (which are often problematic) - but this small drone-copter type of traffic would require a lot more clarification and systems…
On top of that, the autonomous driving part is being feverishly worked on by multiple organizations; at some point in the near future, we’ll see autonomous vehicles on the roads, and once that point is reached, extending that to deliver a pizza will be trivial, since 99% of it will be accomplished by the autonomous driving, and the other 1% will be keeping the pizzas hot, making sure customers don’t jack someone else’s pizza, and optimizing the route that the autonomous pizza vehicle (APV?) takes to get everyone their pizza the fastest.
It could function as basically a mobile vending machine. If they could keep the piazzas hot, it could offer customers additional pizzas from other canceled orders.
Automated cars have tons of applications besides pizza delivery. Rental cars that deliver / return themselves, auto taxis, security vehicles, parking space finder modes, delivery vehicles in general, etc.