On a lunch break last month, a small custom-built octacopter made a 10-minute flight through the city of Guildford, outside of London. Its special cargo: two large pepperoni pizzas.
The delivery was masterminded by a T + Biscuits, an English creative agency that was hired by Domino's to test prototypes. Read more here
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Comments
@Hugues - I think the answer is fairly clearly publicity. Since when would you hire a creative agency in Shoreditch (a hipster-central bit on London) to 'test prototypes'? I wonder who they actually got to do the quadcopter bit?
Delivering Pizza isn't the best example, and has many, many practical problems especially with the delivery part.
But a more controlled delivery system with fixed takeoff and landing Helipads would work, and could be used by companies to transport objects between office buildings, or perhaps even more importantly by hospitals to transport medicine and organs to other hospitals.
I think that's really great that they gave it a try and are publicising it a bit. Non military is nice. As others say, I agree that most systems are not quite there with the object avoidance but step-by-step we're getting there.
In practise:
- too many obstacles in urban environment; tv aerials, phone masts, overhead cables etc.
- order pizza with fake ID, steal multi thousand £ octo.
- FPV will be next to useless in urban environment. Too much noise, too much clutter.
- by the time you've climbed to safe alt, and descended again then RTL'ed, your flight range will be 1km. Hardly practical.
- liability insurance will be a nightmare, and double the price of the pizza!
- you've all seen the loons that deliver pizzas on those scooters, and their riding standards and blatant disregard for traffic laws...would you want them *flying* pizzas over your house???
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