Walmart Is Looking To Get Into The Drone Delivery Game

Not content to let Amazon (the world’s No. 1 retailer) have the corner on the drone delivery market, today Walmart announced its own plans to enter the quadcopter package-delivering fray.

Walmart applied for permission with U.S. regulatory agencies today for permission to test drones for package delivery. The moves comes almost a year after online retailer Amazon announced its own drone-based delivery program, Prime Air.

In an application under Section 333 of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Modernization and Reform Act, first uncovered by Reuters this evening, Walmart applied for an exemption which will allow it to commercially operate Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) under certain circumstances.

The company’s application sought exemptions to conduct outdoor unmanned aircraft flights as part of a research and development effort centered on using unmanned aircraft for operations.

The sphere of domestic drones has been a bit of a wild west in regards to applicable legislation, but regulatory bodies are quickly catching up. Last week, the FAA and DOT announced a program that will require all drone operators to register their unmanned vehicles with the federal government. Section 333 exemptions allow companies looking to explore the use of commercial drones (up to 55 pounds in weight) a means of doing so. After moving at a snail’s pace for months, the FAA has significantly sped up approval of the exemptions and as of October has approved over 2,020 of these applications.

While competitors in this nascent space like Google and Amazon have largely focused on developing proprietary vehicle technologies, Walmart is working with well-known drone manufacturer DJI. In the test flights that Walmart is seeking permission for, the company detailed that it will be using the DJI Phantom 3 Professional and the DJI S900 systems. While neither of the two vehicles are available for sale on Walmart’s website, the Phantom 3 and S900 retail for $1,224 and $1,400 on Amazon.

In addition to investigating the pick up and release of packages, Walmart’s application mentions other potential uses for drones. The submission included five different sample scenarios, which ranged from “aerial data acquisition in support of business analytics” to operations in small residential areas for package delivery. The application also listed grocery pickups, distribution center operations, and rural acreage tracts as other operations areas.

While Walmart’s application does acknowledge the risk involved with UAS in the same space as equipment and human workers, it does not seem like they, or anyone, has a solution to the problem of accidents. Although researchers at ETH Zurich developed a system that allows quadcopters to fly in the event of a rotor failing, most quadcopter drones will fail catastrophically in the event of loss of thrust from one of their four rotors.

Until complete and foolproof reliability is achieved, the danger of a quadcopter delivery vehicle falling on you from 300 feet in the air remains a real concern.

Comments

How ad-free subscriptions could solve Facebook

At the core of Facebook’s “well-being” problem is that its business is directly coupled with total time spent on its apps. The more hours you pass on the social network, the more ads you see and click, the more money it earns. That puts its plan to make using Facebook healthier at odds with its finances, restricting how far it’s willing to go to protect us from the harms of over use. The advertising-supported model comes with some big benefits, though. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly said that “We will always keep Facebook a free service for everyone.” Ads lets Facebook remain free for those who don’t want to pay, and more importantly, for those around the world who couldn’t afford to. Ads pay for Facebook to keep the lights on, research and develop new technologies, and profit handsomely in a way that attracts top talent and further investment. More affluent users with more buying power in markets like the US, UK, and Canada command higher ad prices, effectively...

Airbnb will open its Cuba listings to users outside the United States

Airbnb will now let travelers from outside the U.S. to book properties in Cuba after receiving authorization from the U.S. government, reports the Associated Press . Previously, only Americans were allowed to reserve the site’s Cuban listings . They will open to international users on April 2. Airbnb launched its Cuban operations in April 2014 , four months after the Obama administration revealed that it will begin to restore diplomatic relations with the Communist country . The historic policy change means that travel and trade sanctions will be lifted , which is expected to boost tourism to Cuba dramatically because Americans no longer need licenses to visit. In fact, President Obama is currently on an official visit to Cuba , the first president since Calvin Coolidge to do so. According to the AP, Cuba is currently Airbnb’s fastest-growing market, with about 4,000 homes added since it opened listings. Other travel businesses...

Here’s how to keep track of Elon Musk’s Roadster and Starman in space

Elon Musk’s Starman, the mannequin driver of the Tesla Roadster SpaceX launched aboard its Falcon Heavy rocket, is taking a trip around our solar system, in a large elliptical orbit that will bring him relatively close to Mars, the Sun and other heavenly bodies. But how to track the trip, now that the Roadster’s onboard batteries are out of juice and no longer transmitting live footage? Thanks to the work of Ben Pearson, a SpaceX fan and electrical engineer working in the aerospace industry, who created ‘Where is Roadster,’ a website that makes use of JPL Horizons data to track the progress of the Roadster and Starman through space, and to predict its path and let you know when it’ll come close to meeting up with various planets and the Sun. The website tells you the Roadster’s current position, too, as well as its speed and whether it’s moving towards or away from Earth and Mars at any given moment. It’s not officially affiliated with SpaceX or Tesla, but it is something Elon...

Engineering against all odds, or how NYC’s subway will get wireless in the tunnels

Never ask a wireless engineer working on the NYC subway system “What can go wrong?” Flooding, ice, brake dust, and power outages relentlessly attack the network components. Rats — many, many rats — can eat power and fiber optic cables and bring down the whole system. Humans are no different, as their curiosity or malice strikes a blow against wireless hardware (literally and metaphorically). Serverless software deployment to the cloud, this is not. New York City officially got wireless service in every underground subway station a little more than a year ago, and I was curious what work went into the buildout of this system as well as how it will expand in the future. That curiosity is part of a series of articles I’ve written on an observed pattern known as cost disease, the massively inflating costs of basic human services like health care, housing, infrastructure, and education. The United States spends trillions of dollars on each of these fields, massively outspending sim...

South Korea aims for startup gold

Back in 2011, when South Korea won its longshot bid to host the 2018 Winter Olympics, the country wasn’t widely recognized as a destination for ski and snow lovers. It wasn’t considered much of a tech startup hub either. Fast forward seven years and a lot has changed. For the next 10 days, the eyes of the world will be on the snowy slopes of PyeongChang. Meanwhile, a couple of hours away in Seoul, a burgeoning startup scene is seeing investments multiply, generating exits and even creating a unicorn or two. While South Korea doesn’t get a perfect score as a startup innovation hub, it has established itself as a serious contender. More than half a billion dollars annually has gone to seed through late-stage funding rounds for the past few years. During that time, at least two companies, e-commerce company Coupang and mobile-focused content and commerce company Yello Mobile, have established multi-billion-dollar valuations. To provide a broader picture of how South Korea stacks ...

Exciting Technology

Search This Blog