Drone delivery is expected to take off big time in the next few years. Chinese online retailer JD.com has already launched drone delivery in four provinces in China, while DHL and Zipline are delivering medicines with drones in rural and hard-to-reach areas. Amazon, Google, and UPS are all working on getting drone delivery service off the ground.
There are a lot of issues to think about when it comes to package delivery using drones—safety, privacy, and logistics being some of the main concerns. In a new study, researchers tackle two other important aspects: energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.
Drone delivery is expected to take off big time in the next few years. Chinese online retailer JD.com has already launched drone delivery in four provinces in China, while DHL and Zipline are delivering medicines with drones in rural and hard-to-reach areas. Amazon, Google, and UPS are all working on getting drone delivery service off the ground.
There are a lot of issues to think about when it comes to package delivery using drones—safety, privacy, and logistics being some of the main concerns. In a new study, researchers tackle two other important aspects: energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.
Drones could use less energy and spew fewer emissions into the air than trucks, researchers say. But that advantage diminishes as drones get bigger and use dirty electricity to recharge.
“If you’re delivering a phone or sunglasses, drones would be a good way to go anywhere in the U.S. or most of world,” says Joshua Stolaroff, an environmental scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who led the study published in Nature Communications. “But a larger drone carrying a bag of groceries can lead to higher emissions in a lot of the country with the current electricity grid,” says Stolaroff
Read more at: IEEE Spectrum
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