Drones have always been a charm for people’s eyes. No matter the time of day or night, whenever someone spots a drone in the air, it always creates a sense of excitement and thrill. There was a time when drones were being envisioned as the next leap in the area of aerial surveillance. However, with the passage of time, the promises shown and delivered by drones in experiments grew gradually and today we know them as not just some toys hovering in the air, but the real agents of change for tomorrow. They are the harbinger of change in the area of surveillance, in the area of videography, in the area of goods delivery and also in the area of other scientific research.
What is particularly quite intriguing is the propensity that many retail and wholesale giants are displaying for the application of drones in the area of doorstep delivery. Don’t be surprised if I say that in the next ten years, drones will visit your home for delivery of online ordered products, instead of delivery boys. Don’t be surprised tomorrow if you open your window and are greeted by a drone that hands over to you your ordered product and asks you to pay it the due money. The world of retail is transforming fast and drones are the leading contributors to it.
Warehouse management
Just imagine when you place an order with Amazon or eBay or any other provider, does the ecommerce activity end with the checkout? Is ecommerce restricted to only product discovery, product selection and payment? No, it is not! There is an entire of world of hustle that happens behind your placed order. Once the order gets updated in the backend system, the warehouse managers spring into action and your item is procured from the inventory. Warehouse operations can be a tedious task, even for the most organized and productive people. Preparing a list of all ordered items in bulk and then navigating around the facility to keep collecting the goods can be quite cumbersome. How about we could automate the entire system? What if the warehouse operations could be handled by robots, rather than humans? Surprised? Don’t be, because this is what is already under way in most of the technologically-leading warehouse units. And since you know what we are discussing, you would have already figured it out that drones are going to be the major players in this area.
In the very near future, once the backend systems compile a list of all products ordered online within a day, the list will be shared with an autonomous Warehouse Management System and the Operations Drones will kick into action. The list of items will be distributed into separate categories based on the aisle or shelf they are available in. Each drone will be assigned to a particular aisle and will be having a large autonomous movable cart connected with it. Each Operations Drone will move in its designated aisle and will collect from the shelves those goods that have been assigned to it by the Warehouse Management System. The articles will be dropped into the connected cart which communicates with the Operations Drone through Bluetooth. As the drone moves ahead, the cart moves along too, keeping itself vertically below the Operations Drone.
Once all the items from one aisle have been collected, the Operations Drone updates the central Warehouse Management System and the cart autonomously moves out of the warehouse and delivers the goods to a central Goods Collection Center. The Operations Drone then returns to its base, while the other pairs of carts and Operations Drones continue with their assigned responsibilities.
Collision Avoidance Mechanisms
It can be easily imagined that the autonomous carts may face a situation when two or more of them arrive at the Goods Collection Center simultaneously, or may also face risk of collision while en route to the Center. This will be easily avoided using the collision avoidance mechanisms, whereby two carts on the path to collision will instantly stop at their respective places. The deadlock on who must proceed and who must follow will be resolved by a central system that monitors the movement and location of all the autonomous carts. The democratized intelligence will come into play and will assist in seamless movement of the autonomous carts. The same case will be replicated for the drones who may happen to be on a collision path while maneuvering in the air.
Route Optimization
Now here comes the most exciting part of the lifecycle. Once the goods have been packaged and have been sorted according to the delivery locations, the Delivery Drones will kick into action. The Warehouse Management System will pass the baton to the Central Dispatch System, which will create an optimized route for a Delivery Drone to follow for delivering the goods at the doorstep. The optimized route for each Delivery Drone will have around three to four delivery locations that the drone will have to cover, and the products will be stacked in the reverse order of their sequence in the map. That means, the product for the first delivery location will be at the bottom of the stack, so that when the Delivery Drone goes about from one doorstep to another, it can simply unload the good at the bottom of its stack.
Yes, before dispatching the Delivery Drones, the Central Dispatch System in the warehouse will check for the availability of the receivers in their respective places. Otherwise, a drone will face issues. Suppose the first receiver is not at home, then the drone won’t be able to drop the first shipment. As a result, when the drone reaches the second delivery location, the concerned item won’t be droppable as the first item is still in the stack. Therefore, it will be required of the receivers to confirm their availability at the time calculated by the Central Dispatch System.
Once equipped with the route and the maps of the city or town, the Delivery Drones will take off with their delivery stack. Guided by GPS, they will navigate through the aerial routes to reach the delivery locations. Real-time updates will be provided by the Delivery Drones to the Central Dispatch System on the current location, weather updates and aerial traffic conditions. It will be recommended for the drones to not fly too close to the buildings and other structures on their way, lest they face any collision or any deliberate attempt by miscreants to disrupt their flight.
Delivery Drones shall move in a coordinated fashion, which means that each one will know the location of the others and any inclement situation at one place will be informed to every other Delivery Drones immediately.
Delivery and Payments
Once at the doorstep or at the window, the customer will be presented with the delivery package on which there will be a QR code. The customer will have to scan the QR code using the app of the retail marketplace, following which the customer will be redirected towards payment gateway. The customer will perform an online payment which will be updated to the drone. In case the payment is already done, the redirected page will confirm to the customer that the delivery process is complete. The drone will then dislodge the bottommost package to the customer and will fly away to its next delivery location.
It may so happen that customers living in high-rise apartments will have to climb down to collect their package, since drones cannot be allowed to enter gated apartment complexes for security reasons. Therefore, multiple drones may arrive with packages, because of a large number of customers from the residential complex. In this case, the drones will autonomously spread themselves across the boundary of the resident complex, so that they don’t collide with each other. The customer will be informed of the exact location of the Delivery Drone associated with her, and an in-apartment navigation route will be displayed to the customer, so that she can reach the Delivery Drone at the earliest. Also, since the Delivery Drone will already know its location outside the complex, the customer can be informed well in advance of the location of the drone’s arrival.
Democratized Intelligence at play
In an inclement situation, a Delivery Drone may suffer technical malfunction and may drop dead on its way to delivery. In such situations, the stack of packages may remain safe, as they are securely stacked. However, the delivery process may get delayed to the customer. In such circumstances, the democratized intelligence kicks in. Suppose drone ‘A’ goes down on its way. The Central Dispatch System gets the SOS signal and alerts all the other Delivery Drones regarding the disruption. The Delivery Drone communicate among themselves and share their exact geographical coordinates and the status of the remaining task. Based on which drone is in proximity to the location of failure and which one has less task left, one of the drone in the Delivery Drones Matrix is assigned the responsibility to report at the site of failure and pick the consignments. Another drone is assigned the responsibility of picking the malfunctioned drone and bringing it back to the warehouse. This way the entire delivery system can run autonomously using democratized intelligence.
However, the safety of the packages with the malfunctioned drone will have to be looked into, along with the safety of the citizens near or on whom the drone may drop. Collateral damages will have to be paid by the drone operators. Alternatively, as a part of predictive maintenance, the Delivery Drones can keep updating their health status to the Central Dispatch System and any drone that looks to be malfunctioning can be called back or can be asked to land at a safer place, and wait for a fellow drone to come to rescue. The customers of the delayed packages will be informed accordingly.
Lower carbon Footprint
What stands out in the entire drone-driven delivery process is that the drones don’t contribute much to the carbon emissions, which is a major issue with the vehicle-led delivery system of the present times. The reduced carbon footprint can be another feather in the cap of the drone-driven delivery system. Companies will also be empowered to automate the entire delivery process and thereby bring efficiencies to the ecommerce operations.
In a Nutshell
The future of retail is certainly going to be much more autonomous and much faster than today. It is not only the retail marketplaces that will benefit out of the drone-driven delivery system, but also the pure-play ecommerce players. Retail outlets will be able to take in online orders and dispatch the goods using drones that find their own optimized routes and navigate on their own through the city. The democratized intelligence will also make the drones intelligent enough to take decisions on the edge and make every move that optimizes the retail supply chain.
And while you approach the end of this article, it may very well be the case that some company is already running a prototype of the use case we just explored. The drones of tomorrow are going to be much more than what our imagination makes us believe.
