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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I take the opposite view: It is exactly this type of vision that will enable small robotic aircraft to be accepted as a useful and valuable tool by the public. The contest here is "Ethics of Progress", and is the debate between: Should we allow powerful technologies to develop which *might* be used destructively, yet which allow for vast improvement in human quality of life. Will robotic aircraft pizza delivery happen? Yes. Will there be issues such as the UAV being stolen, malfunctions which crash said vehicle into people, and other issues? Yes. But is it worth it? If you could have an AED drone show up a minute after you make an emergency call; if getting packages delivered in 1 day instead of 3 days is cool, and if all the other uses of the concept outweigh the flaws, then yes!
The question of if this will happen is already known: As long as society keeps improving and growing, it will. The real question is when.
Video with a few points on Ethics of Progress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=95KhuS...
. . . It's pretty hilarious how gullible some people are.
looking carefully at the video, it is pretty obvious that it is fake. Photoshopped in some way (multiple scenes taken from cameras where, in other scenes no camera is present, etc.). The scene where it appears to be taken from another aircraft altogether, not likely.
because this tipe of think that small UAV will be banned .
do you really think it will be possible in furure ? Its a joke.
i dont want this kind of think flying above my head.
@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.
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