UPS Teams Up With CVS
TechCrunch reports UPS and CVS Deliver Prescription Medicine Via Drone to US Residential Customers for the First Time.
UPS is rolling along with its drone delivery program, working with partner CVS Pharmacy to deliver prescription drugs to customer doorsteps via its newly deployed commercial drones. UPS delivered medications to two paying customers on November 1 using the Matternet M2 drone system that the logistics company is using in partnership with Matternet ..
UPS received approval last month from the FAA to fly its fleet of commercial drones in service of customers, and now it plans to iterate its drone delivery program “in the coming months,” with the aim of ensuring that it can deploy UAVs in a commercial capacity at increasing scale. It also launched “UPS Flight Forward,” a dedicated division focused on autonomous drone delivery.
This isn’t the first time UPS has deployed drones in a healthcare industry setting: The company has been working with Mattternet and WakeMed Hospital in Raleigh, doing commercial deliveries of medical samples in a B2B setting.
Drone History
Reuters comments on Drone History
Flight Forward’s maiden delivery flight on Friday in Cary, North Carolina, beat rivals in one phase of the race for the nascent market. The second drone flight delivered medications to a public space at a retirement community.
The packages, roughly the size of small shoeboxes, were lowered from drones hovering at an altitude of about 20 feet.
Wing, a drone operator owned by Google parent Alphabet Inc, is partnering with Walgreens and FedEx Corp for a home delivery pilot in Christiansburg, Virginia.
Helathcare Delivered
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exy26kYgOLk
Pizza Coming Up
Drone delivery is ahead of where I expected things to be. Pizza deliveries coming up.
Competition is good.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
Drone test flight successfully delivers drugs in Canada for 1st time. Drone flew 11k from London Drugs, Duncan BC to a rural customer on Salt Spring Island.
CBC News August 29, 2019
In the end I don’t think this will be a thing as the complexity of managing the airspace with all those deliveries of “individual” packages will be too much. OTOH Driverless UPS/FEDEX/FOOD trucks that pull up to the closest curbside and send you a text to come get you stuff from the truck via a door on the side that you put a code in from the txt message like the amazon lockers but on wheels. I can see that being a bit more realizable and cost effective as it eliminates the local driver labor costs and they can run late and on weekends/holidays.
There are a gazillion scripts daily, among other things. Does everyone really want to see these stupid things buzzing all over the place? Screw this crap. Now what, UPS has a monopoly on this crap? Let me guess, it’s the same price as having someone drive it to you? Someone should open a drone rental/service and cut UPS out of it. I can see it now, your scripts have an “electrical surcharge”. Call me old fashioned, but I dont want to see the skyline loaded with this crap and thank god they cant reach my area yet. I’m cant wait to hear stories about ghetto chicken hunting. When they find out theres crap flying overhead its game on. Esp if they are stupid enough to send pain pills.
If deployment of these things could make indoctrinated saps realize, like the Founders, that everyone needs access to firearms, nowadays including anti-lowflying-aircraft rocketry; instead of the dumb dupes sitting there cheering for the totalitarians to take their guns away; that alone would make drones the greatest boon to humanity since Jefferson or something.
Imagine a sky with 10s of 1000s of drones daily. Enjoy visiting birds at the zoo.
All sorts of wildlife and pets too, birds will abandon nests, you would be surprised at how many animals live in cities. But as I say below, we are also animals and on an instinctive level we also have a strong flight or fight response to them, even if we can stop ourselves from running, it still provokes a response from the adrenal glands that has severe effects on all sorts of bodily systems. All for corporate profits so they can save a buck on deliveries.
Whatever you think about them your opinion is worth exactly zero, nobody is listening, they are going to do this and it is going to harm your way of life.
Have any of you ever actually heard a drone? They sound exactly like a gigantic swarm of Africanized bees which no matter how you think you can control it invokes the Fight/Flight response on a survival level in the human brain.
And these things are going to be EVERYWHERE in 5 years, you will never be able to get away from them. Aside from the question, how to keep drugs delivered (as well as anything actually) out of the hands of curious kids and meth addicted homeless people, we have a lot of those here, and they will steal absolutely anything. Ever seen a pet chew open a plastic drug bottle? So long Fido. As to how it could deliver to many homes where access to a porch is either blocked or no porch exists in the first place, and the question I want to ask is how many billions have scientists and technicians and governments and corporations spent to misallocate all this money? Just as I will never ride in a computer driven car I will never receive a drone delivered package.
This is going to vastly lower your quality of life and there is not one single thing you can do about it because once this much money has been spent they are never going to admit it was a mistake and ban the crappy things. Just one more reason to leave.
Agree 100% expect the leave part. Any place that isn’t a ****hole is going to have drones.
It will be like Bladrunner.
But without sexbots.
Drone builders are working on better sound shielded drones. The military supposedly already have some, at least in labs. They can be built, but they will inevitably be bigger, more expensive and less efficient.
Single rotor craft, with a steering tail, like a regular helicopter, can be made quieter, as a bigger rotor sweep requires less rotor speed per unit of lift, and a bigger swept circle increases lift versus fast moving, noisy, rotor tip turbulence. But they have less inherent stability, and are less obvious to control, so require more finely attuned active intervention.
But yes, every single currently sold drone, is in no way compatible with mass deployed, low altitude flight over populated areas. Nor I suspect, even animal populated ones. Of course that never stopped any Progressive government, from sleep depriving every resident of every poorer inner city neighborhood, by deploying low flying helicopters with retina burning light beams looking for a marijuana joint or a six shooter, over “those peoples” heads all night…
When family dogs start getting teeth knocked out and paws cut up we will see the lawsuits start, and the most corporate benevolent government will exempt them from lawsuits.
So when will we see some sort of airspace coordinated control over these cities? Will it just be an extension of the nearest FAA controlled airport? I can’t imagine a cloud of these going about their deliveries without some sort of centralized coordinated control…..UPS.FEDEX,DHL,WALMART,CVS,WALGREENS,AMAZON, Pizza Hut, Dominos, etc… and assume there will be more than one aircraft for each doing simultaneous deliveries into low altitude spaces.
The first thing that will happen is that personal drones will be banned.
Of course. The goal is for everything to be banned, unless you are counted among the More Equals.
There are an awful lot of “lanes” available, on a 3 dimensional freeway as wide as a continent……
Noise needs to be brought down, at least compared to any drone I have experienced, before swarms of them are all that compatible with populated areas. Of course, in dystopia, that will only apply to neighborhoods where more equals live. Then it magically won’t be a problem. Just as traffic isn’t a problem, as long as More Equals have enough speed bumps in their neighborhoods to shift traffic jams to where mere equals live.
Of course there are lots of “lanes” but who coordinates who has what lane vertically and horizontally at any point in time and space was my question.
If nothing else, the same “who” who coordinated which cowboy on horseback had which lane back when America still retained some trappings of a civilized society… “Drive only on the right side of designated roads,” isn’t that old…
Hopeless SciFi romantics at the FAA, have also been thinking about the congestion problems resulting from flying cars, since at least Flash Gordon. As has the 99.9% of Silicon Valley drone builders who are into general aviation. The conclusion is that there is so much space, so many lanes, that you can just about grab any half coherent scheme, and it will work perfectly well.
I just can’t imagine how ‘pranksters’ won’t see these things as excellent objects for target practice or interdiction of some type. How long will it be before they’re shooting down or intentionally deviated for the contents? Software programs that allow a person from the comfort of their easy chair to use local radar to go after these devices from hundreds of miles away. This will be like a live video game….
Don’t think it’ll happen?
Well, think about a text messaging system where one would call a third party, tell the third party the message (and be charged by the letter). The third party would then deliver that message on a piece of paper to the intended recipient. Few people could imagine the text messaging system we have now….
BTW, for you youngsters, it’s called a telegram….
Well, I guess it will at least force the obese off their couches to walk to the front door to pick up their diabetes drugs.
Next up, delivery of fentanyl and crystal meth.
I read an article about drugs being delivered by a drone a year ago. It was to a prison yard. Along with cash and a cell phone.
Military drone tech is creeping into policing and everyday life https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/all-activities-monitored
Like Arpanet did a few decades ago…. And airplanes did prior to that again….
Drones are banned in our city, including for commercial use.
what city?
I’ll email you.
Bans like this will be removed once the city officials feel that their cities are falling behind other cities where drone deliveries are allowed.
They are banned here for a variety of reasons. One being fire hazard. A crashed drone could easily cause a spark, which would start another wildfire. You can’t even ride an E-bike off pavement/on the trail.
IF cities can impose a drone tax, then it’s a sure thing they will approve it.
Yes, they will probably require a licence that needs to be renewed every year. Droning without licence = fine.
The city doesn’t care about revenue from drones. They are considered a fire hazard due to the vast open space that surrounds us. Its simply not worth the risk.
Give it time.
Nice! Congrats to UPS and Matternet.
While medicine delivery may be the killer app for this, there is a virtually unlimited number of applications for very low latency delivery of small packages. Even P2P: “Junior forgot his lunchbox or ballet shoes or keys” type things.