Self-Driving Cars Paired With Autonomous Drones For Faster Fastest Fast Food Delivery

Look in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane, no, it is an autonomous drone. Not just any autonomous drone, but one carrying a freshly cooked juicy hamburger and some mouth-watering crispy French fries.

Meanwhile, please look down there at the road below, is it a speeding locomotive, no, it’s a self-driving driverless car that is going to be the landing pad for the fast food carrying driverless drone.

I’ve now described for you the approach being tested by several major companies that are embarking upon speeding up the delivery of fast food to your home or business. The idea is that the fast food restaurant cooks your requested meal, they then place it into an autonomous drone, the drone flies rapidly to an autonomous car that is nearby your home or business, lands on the autonomous car, and the autonomous car then finishes the delivery journey by driving up to your door.

Recently, Uber got in the news for its initial tryouts in San Diego, California, taking baby steps toward this overarching approach, and will this summer be advancing their efforts even further with its initial partner, McDonalds restaurants. You might say that Uber Eats and Uber Elevate are moving us into the space age, which just about all other food delivery services are also hopeful of doing.

Rather than the conventional method of using a human driver that picks up your meal at the local McDonalds and drives it to you, the aim is to have an autonomous drone be the pick-up and also speedily get the meal reasonably close to your destination, leaving the last dollop of remaining distance for the driverless car to finish the delivery.

According to their earlier trials, Uber claims that the drone usage will cut the 21 minutes for an all ground-based driven method of covering a 1.5-mile distance to instead be about 7 minutes, thus shaving two-thirds of the delivery time. Presumably, you will be happier to get your ordered meal into your hungry hands sooner, plus the recently cooked meal is more likely to still be in its pristine juicy and crispy state.

Let’s unpack some of the salient elements of this autonomous pairing, namely the jointly tasked and coordinated efforts of autonomous drones with autonomous cars.

Why Use Such High-Tech For Fast Food Delivery

First, I’m sure that some of you are vexed about using the sophistication of high-tech drones as coupled with the sophistication of high-tech driverless cars to simply deliver a Big Mac to your door. Of all of the important things to be done on this planet and for our world, does being able to more quickly deliver fast food qualify as a basis for utilizing the most advanced technology that can be created?

Well, given that the food delivery industry is forecasted to rise to about $76 billion by the year 2022, I guess you could say the answer is yes, indeedy do, as it makes indubitable profitable sense to exploit whatever technology you can find or craft in order to grab part of those massive delivery bucks beckoning to be spent.

Of course, the delivery payload does not need to be fast food. You could use the same arrangement to deliver medicines to those that are in vital need, such as the efforts of the company Zipline doing so in Rwanda. The payload could consist of critically needed blood supplies, or might have vaccines that are being used to combat a spreading malady.

Depending upon the size of the drones being used for delivery, the same approach could be used to deliver packages and parcels. There has been a lot of reporting about trials underway by UPS, USPS, Amazon, and many other logistics and transport companies that see the future involving drones overhead to get goods from point A to point B.

My overall point is that it is prudent to pursue the drones and driving approach for delivery and you can then choose what kinds of items to deliver.

In a sense, deliver whatever you can at first, providing an opportunity to perfect the tech and the approach, which ultimately once the kinks are ironed out you can then use for a multitude of purposes. Fast food delivery offers a twofer, it will make money as a delivery mechanism and it will advance the ability to enact deliveries in this fashion.

Does Autonomy Make A Difference

The next point you might be pondering is whether it is necessary to use an autonomous drone, officially referred to as an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), and whether it is necessary to use an autonomous car, which is another kind of Autonomous Vehicle (AV).

Nope, you don’t need to have autonomy baked into all of this.

You could have a manned drone that is controlled by a human operator. You could have the manned drone flown to a manned car. The human driver in the car would then finish driving the final distance to the indicated destination. All of the human labor though is going to push-up your costs to do the delivery. You also would need to deal with being able to hire the needed labor, and cope with all of the other human resources elements that accompany having humans-in-the-loop.

Most are betting that the human out-of-the-loop will be cheaper than having humans in-the-loop.

In theory, you also can cut down on the chances of human error, such as the operator of the drone getting careless and flying the drone to the wrong place, or the human driver in the car having fallen asleep doesn’t awaken once the food has been delivered to the car. Autonomy, once properly established, would do away with those qualms, though of course introduces other aspects such as the need to keep the autonomous systems up-to-date and monitored.

Does The Car Need To Be Included

So far, I’ve hopefully conveyed that it makes sense that there would be a drone involved in the delivery, and this begs another question about whether it is needed to have a car involved too.

Why not just have the drone directly deliver the fast food to the final destination, rather than to a car?

The issue with delivering directly to a destination such as a home would be the matter of how to get the payload into the hands of the person that ordered the meal.

You could have the drone land in the backyard or front yard of a home, which many are experimenting with, but this is a dicey proposition since the yard might be cluttered and there isn’t a viable and safe spot to land on. Or, maybe the yard has a dog that isn’t going to favor a foreign craft that comes into the animal’s turf. Someone or something can get hurt by the landing drone.

If landing the drone into a yard isn’t good, some have attempted to use a cable that would gradually lower the payload from the drone, keeping the drone hovering and off the ground, and thus allow the person to get their meal or package by plucking it from the end of the cable. This has its own downsides, including that you now have a hovering drone, which is not good for various reasons, and the cable and its payload can become a potential swinging bat that could hit or harm someone or something.

All in all, you would want to have the drone land someplace that is safe and secure. Voila, use the top of a car. You could have a designated car that is especially equipped for a drone to land on the top of the car, and the car could then proceed to drive to the final destination. This gives you a guaranteed landing spot, and one without the other issues of landing in a yard or dangling the payload.

More About The Autonomous Car As The Landing Zone

Alright, so we’ll use an autonomous car for this purpose, which provides a handy, secure, and safe landing spot, and we won’t use a human driver, partially to cut down on the costs involved in the delivery process. You’ll see in a moment that there are additional reasons to remove the human driver from this equation.

Where will the autonomous car be?

That’s a good question.

The delivery process is behooved by trying to get the autonomous car as close to the final destination as feasible, thereby reducing the driving time portion of the journey. The autonomous car could park on the street, perhaps in front of the home or down the street from the home, though this might not be a clear and safe enough place to land the drone.

Suppose the street involved has a beautiful canopy formed by lush trees on both sides of the street. Bad news for trying to land the drone. There might be power lines and telephone poles. Etc. As such, the autonomous car might go park itself in an empty parking lot, wait for the drone to arrive, have the drone land, and then proceed to the final destination.

Generally, once the drone lands on the car, there’s not much of a need to keep the drone there, and thus it would disgorge its payload and then likely lift-off right away. I say right away because the drone is really only a money maker whenever it is in the act of delivery. No sense in having it sit on the top of the car when it can be rushing onward to get the next newly cooked chicken sandwich and onion rings that a starving customer is eagerly awaiting.

Some Added Details About The Autonomous Car

There are some very interesting logistical problems that come to play in this drone and driving delivery method.

Imagine that you have a fleet of autonomous cars.

You might dedicate some of the autonomous cars to being solely for delivery purposes, but this then restricts the opportunities to make money with those driverless cars so allocated. It might be better to have your autonomous cars available as ridesharing or ride-haling vehicles, and also equip them to handle the food delivery aspects, such as having specialized equipment mounted on the car to allow for the drone landings.

Here’s the tricky part. You want to keep your autonomous cars roaming to do ridesharing. When an autonomous drone delivery is imminent, you want to detect which of your driverless cars is closest to the final destination, one that hasn’t been tagged as yet for a pending ridesharing request, and for which any of those candidate available driverless cars can also best get to a place to park that will be suitable to allow the drone to land and then take-off.

You’ll need some pretty clever algorithms and routing software to figure this out. I make this point to emphasize that the autonomous drone and the autonomous car aren’t the only “systems” elements of this delivery process, and there needs to be the “glue” that aids the drone and car in coordinating their efforts. More AI to be had, I’d wager.

Lots Of Aspects To Sort Through

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is in the driver’s seat on these matters due to the drones being involved, including requiring that any companies using drones for delivery must get an FAA designated Air Carrier Certification. There is an overall FAA program known as the Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) Integration Pilot Program (IPP), currently governing the various tryouts and trials that companies such as Uber are undertaking.

Driverless cars also have their own set of regulations, somewhat, as per the states allowing autonomous cars on their public roadways.

To avoid having drones flying and crisscrossing over dense urban and city areas, the pairing of autonomous drones with autonomous cars makes a lot of sense, allowing the driverless drone to be routed in a means to minimize its time over populated areas and then rendezvous with a driverless car that’s awaiting the receiving of the payload.

Could the autonomous car be in-motion when rendezvousing with the driverless drone, rather than being parked? Yes, that’s a definite possibility and could shorten further the time needed to make the final delivery, though it introduces other facets.

Would a moving driverless car that is being approached by a drone be somewhat startling to human drivers that might be in nearby cars? Imagine you are on the freeway, driving your car, and all of a sudden a drone swoops down from the clouds and lands on the autonomous car in front of you. Doubtful that human drivers would not react adversely to the matter.

Likewise, this is another reason to have the autonomous car rather than use a human to drive the drone receiving car, since a human driving a car might not be as adept at timing the landing of the drone, whereas a driverless car could be electronically in communication with the drone to align for the landing and take-off actions.

Conclusion

Societal questions are being asked about how safe are the drones, since an autonomous drone might go awry and crash into someone or something, doing so while on a journey to deliver a burger, and one would right away wonder whether the damage or injuries were worth the desire to get fast food into someone’s hands.

Where will the autonomous car be when the drone attempts to land is another big question. Suppose the autonomous car chooses to park in a school parking lot, and moments later the kids are let out of class because the school day has ended. Do you want a driverless drone coming to land onto a parked autonomous car in a school zone? Probably not.

As per the stated principles of the FAA’s efforts, we all need to undertake a meaningful dialogue about how to balance everyone’s interests on such matters.

Once we’ve figured that out, I guess the only questions leftover will be whether to order the cheeseburger or the fish sandwich.