The hype surrounding drones may finally be starting to pay off.
Drone delivery, first touted by Amazon more than a decade ago, is slowly taking off in some parts of the US. On Thursday, drone delivery startup Matternet launched its service to Silicon Valley.
“After years of making strides in drone delivery in healthcare, we are excited to launch our first home delivery operation in the heart of Silicon Valley,” said Andreas Raptopoulos, Founder and CEO of Matternet, in a blog post. “We are entering the next phase of scale in drone delivery: we are building a new layer of ultra-efficient logistics infrastructure that will become an essential utility for every household.”
The announcement adds to signs of growth for drone delivery. In Fort Worth, Texas, which recently became the first major city in the United States to offer commercial drone deliveries, they are being used to deliver groceries from WalMart.
In College Station, Texas, Amazon’s drone delivery service has become common enough for residents to find the service noisy. And with the recent FAA approval, the company appears poised to expand drone delivery operations in the city and beyond.
Experts say many of the barriers to drone delivery, particularly technology and regulations, have been overcome.
“I think that, after a slow start of about a decade, drone delivery appears to be accelerating, both in terms of technological capabilities and in terms of policy and regulation in the United States,” said Costa Samaras, director of the Scott Institute for Carnegie Mellon. Energy innovation, told NBC News.
Samaras said the drones, which are powered by electricity, will mainly be used to transport lightweight, time-sensitive products such as medicines or groceries. It’s an attractive innovation, he said, because most deliveries are still made by cars with combustion engines that are polluting and inefficient.
“If you forgot something in the store, or need something quickly, it’s easier and faster to have it delivered by drone than with your car, and it’s much better for the climate,” he said.
Samaras said his research shows that compared to delivery with fossil fuel trucks, drone delivery uses up to 90% less energy per package.
But the regulatory framework and self-driving technology have only recently caught up to the hype.
The Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement that it is focused on allowing Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations, which would allow drones to fly without requiring a pilot to remain in line of sight.
Zipline, the world’s largest drone delivery service, is among the companies that have received that approval in several states. The company plans to go nationwide with drone deliveries by 2026.
“A lot of the risks have gone away, and I’m super excited about how much progress we’ll be able to make in the coming years now that a lot of this uncertainty is behind us,” Eric Watson, engineering lead at Zipline, told NBC News.
Watson said the company hopes to deliver tens of thousands of packages per day across the country in the coming years, and they are already making deliveries in Arkansas and Utah, with plans to expand to Dallas later this year.
A spokesperson for Amazon’s drone delivery program Prime Air told NBC News that it hopes to deliver 500 million packages a year by the end of this decade.
The FAA told NBC News that there are currently more than 383,000 drones registered for commercial purposes. The agency predicts that by 2028, that number could rise above 3 million.
Yanfeng Ouyang, a professor of transportation engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, agrees that the technology is close to mass availability, but hopes some of the potential negative impacts can be mitigated.
“It is imminent and we will see very rapid development in the next two years,” Ouyang said.
“But there are still several challenges to be addressed,” he added, such as the potential for an expanded surveillance state, as well as whether communities will be okay with having a large number of drones flying overhead all the time.
“I am optimistic, but I don’t think there are enough regulations yet, and I think the government will have to play a very important role in the future,” Ouyang said.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
