By Katie Davis
UPS, the world’s largest courier, looks to the skies to cut costs and increase service recently launching an unmanned aerial vehicle from the roof of a UPS truck. In a project that sees UPS partner up with their plug-in electric delivery vehicles manufacture Workhorse Group Inc, they have designed a “rolling warehouse” system in which an 18 pound drone is deployed with up to a 10 pound payload from the roof of a UPS truck and able to fly at an altitude of 200 feet to the parcels destination. However, the most impressive part is that the drone was then able to return to the roof of the truck, which had moved about 2,000 feet from its original take off.
UPS is very excited about the success of these initial tests as they look to drones as a way to cut costs and ease delivery in hard-to- reach rural areas where the distance between stops drives up fuel and labor costs. UPS has not disclosed how much this new technology could save the company, but industry experts say that reducing each driver’s mileage by as little as a mile a day could save $50 million a year considering UPS has more than 100,000 vehicles on the road each day.
However, Mark Wallace, UPS’s senior vice president of global engineering and sustainability is quick to say that, “Drones won’t replace our uniformed service providers,” then Wallace goes on to say that UPS’s technology is, “key, but in this case, it really is there to assist.”
Although initial tests have been successful for UPS, current U.S. regulations make the use of this technology for deliveries impossible for now. But with UPS, Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc. also looking at the opportunities this type of innovation could have for their businesses I am sure that will be pressure put on the Federal Aviation Administration to re-evaluate their guidelines for operations in the near future.