The thing that makes rural areas inefficient for trucks (distance between customers) is far worse for drones. Drones have to be based out of somewhere close to the customer due to their short battery life, which means you have to have a lot of bases, each of which only serves a handful of customers. A truck will burn a lot of fuel per customer, but a single one can still serve a large area on one tank and can be based out of a nearby city.
A truck will burn a lot less fuel per kg of cargo. That's because it is carrying many packages at once and fuel consumption is split across all packages. A drone only carries one package. So in reality a truck is a way more efficient way of delivering good.
Seems like the best compromise is something like the "drone spitter" delivery trucks from Ready Player One.
The truck wouldn't need to slow down (let alone stop), multiple drones would give high utilization, and you could further optimize delivery routes by "crow flying" to houses that aren't even on the same street.
I suspect this still only works if you can utilize the capacity and have simultaneous deliveries, which would required a cluster of deliveries, thus likely not good for rural areas.
>I suspect this still only works if you can utilize the capacity and have simultaneous deliveries
You can still eliminate inefficient stop-and-go driving for some fraction of stops (ie not U-turns), and (most important) the time-wasting "last 100 feet" walk. Sure it's not as superior in rural areas vs suburban, but with low enough overhead you could still beat a traditional truck.
Naturally if the drone gear cost millions of dollars and took up half the truck, then I'd agree it wouldn't be worth it. In reality I don't think that's the trade.
Who is gonna take the box off the shelf in the truck and attach it to the drone? Boxes are stacked on the truck and move all around, not set neatly spaced on a shelf that doesn't move. You'll need another robot to do that for you.
A drone must supply its own lift against the pull of gravity.
A truck gets that for free via tyres and tarmac.
Air travel makes sense for high-value and time-sensitive payloads, most especially passengers, but also communications (airmail delivery was, and remains, a significant revenue source for airlines).
Fixed-wing drones (as Zipline uses in Rwanda) are more efficient than rotary craft, as forward velocity generates lift, though at a cost of being unable to hover, which makes point delivery to locations lacking a landing strip (or other capture device) more challenging. Zipine utilises parachutes (and lightweight cargo) for its deliveries. Pivot-rotor craft (which Zipline seems to be experimenting with for urban deliveries) make hovering more viable whilst preserving the efficiency of fixed-wing flight.
I still see this as an option with very limited applicability.
You're probably right, it's the equivalent of public transportation for cargo. And you still need a truck to deliver the packages to all those drone bases anyway.
that sounds like a fun travelling salesman problem with more moving parts. What is the best route for this drone platform truck, taking into account how efficient it is for each drone to make its delivery, and how the truck’s position will have changed in the time it takes for the drone to return.
That is actually a problem under research; there are a few papers on it and luckily they use the obvious name — TSP with drones or TSP-D.
I gave that problem a very shallow go for a Metaheuristics assignment, and while I didn't really mess with the domain specific heuristics for it, it did seem pretty fun indeed.
