Why has no one done this yet?

Quadcopter food delivery.

The concept seems too simple once you put it together, to the point where I don't understand why it hasn't already been done. As in a previous post where I discuss the merits of quadrotor flying robots we have machines capable of physically accomplishing the task, we have programming and flight control technologies to get the bots from point A to point B, and a smart phone provides all the communication infrastructure that could ever be necessary to coordinate movement.

Lets walk through how the process would look from the point of view of a person hungry for pizza. Bob is a average guy living in a house, Bob wants pizza to eat while he watches the game, so Bob calls up the local pizza joint and orders a pizza. The pizza joint takes the order and being for delivery accepts Bob's information to place the order, his name, phone number, address, and credit card info for payment. The pizza joint now has all the information they need to autonomously deliver the pizza as soon as it's out of the oven. At the end of the call the person taking the order asks if front yard delivery or backyard delivery would work better for him, this question is informed by the order taker having input Bob's address into a google maps program that pulls up a location for his address, and providing an overhead visual of the residence, Bob says his preference is the back yard (because the backyard is closer to the couch)

The order is complete and the pizza making team start making Bob's pizza. The digital order ticket is ready and corresponds to the pizza moving through the oven. As soon as the pizza is done cooking and in the box the receipt is printed out and taped onto the top of the box, (the same process that almost every pizza chain uses). An employee takes a few steps outside to where the "delivery coordinator"(the only employee needed to conduct all deliveries for a food delivery business) is setup. The employee carrying the pizza walks up to the delivery bot next in the que, uses the barcode reader function built into the smart phone which is attached to the bot, to inform the bot which order it is delivering. The employee then places the pizza into the pizza container box just like the ones that delivery drivers use to keep the pizza hot, and press a "ready" button on the top of the delivery bot to inform the bot that it can now start the delivery process.

As soon as the "ready" button is pressed the delivery bot becomes autonomous. First the bot powers up all systems while still attached to the charging station and does a quick functions check. Ensuring all the rotors are providing correct maximum thrust, the batteries have correct capacity, the smartphone brain has no faults in it's subsystems or it's ability to communicate. When all the checks are complete the bot will check it's surroundings for anything impeding it's ascension, if none are found the delivery bot will immediately rocket skywards to a preplanned altitude of 400 feet at an inclination so as to establish buffer room from the incoming and outgoing delivery bots.

Although the delivery bot will be following a very specific set of flight plans for each delivery, it will not appear as such to the person observing. The delivery bot will appear to rocket off the ground, flying high into the sky then banking off into the distance. This is because as soon as the bot reaches its first planned flight reference point it will begin it's progress to the second. The second flight reference point will be established as 400 feet directly above the location selected in the order process as the delivery location. Once the delivery bot arrives at the second flight reference point it will do three things simultaneously, start a "FaceTime" video call back to the restaurant, and begin descending to a height of 40 feet and begin a cell phone call to Bob who ordered the pizza. The bot will maintain a hover at 40 feet until the "delivery coordinator" is able to observe the process to oversee the delivery bot's actions. This is important because until we have true artificial intelligence it will be important for the last few feet to be carefully watched for any unexpected hazard.

Bob hears his phone ringing and picks it up, getting an automated message that the delivery bot is at his house ready to deliver his pizza, Bob walks out his back door and sees the bot hovering above his backyard. The delivery coordinator back at the store, seeing that Bob is ready to receive his pizza presses the "deliver" button on his controls. The delivery bot now lowers the pizza warming box from its main body so the food box is several feet lower than the rotor body, and using a laser range finder comes to a hover so that the box is exactly at the right height for a person to retrieve pizza. The smart phone that initiated a "FaceTime" call earlier is with the box. The delivery coordinator sees Bob and greats him, thanking him for his order and explaining his pizza is ready for him to take it. Bob sees his pizza presented to him and slides it out of the warming box. The delivery coordinator presses the "delivery complete" button and the delivery bot immediately begins ascending reeling the pizza warming box in as it rises.

www.cam-and-carrier.com

http://www.cam-and-carrier.com/products/vario-quad-copter.htmlOnce the bot has reached 300 feet it begins it's flight back to the descent rally point over the restaurant. Once at the rally point the delivery bot touches down on a available charging station and wait's for it's next delivery.

I agree that it seems like there are a lot of moving pieces to this idea. What is important to keep in mind is how mature these systems are, and how readily they will work together. Nothing in this idea would require new technology, components would include an off the shelf quad or hexa copter (depending on delivery capacity needed) and a smart phone (doesn't matter what kind, but the same functions of an iPhone5) then you would need a programmer to write the purpose built application to run on the phone that would execute the functions. There would be some digital infrastructure needed at hub to control the fleet of delivery bots but once again all very simple challenges.

The beautiful elegant element to the whole idea is that the Bob character does nothing different, and gets his pizza faster. All the complexity is procedurally executed by the technology and the people can spend more time doing people things, like asking if everything looks correct when Bob opens the lid and finds the pizza totally squished from the G forces the cooks forgot to include onions or anchovies.

Just imagine if you added a couple LED's to the quad copter and maybe a speaker for sound effects, you would have every kid in america begging their parents to "order food from that place that delivers with helicopters" just so they could see the spectacle. 

Could this happen faster than any of us thought?

The prospect of coming singularities happening at a much more violently rapid rate than any of us thought crossed my mind. I read about the Portabee 3D printer the other day, and as I was reviewing the website i came across the fact that the Portabee 3D printer is made by Portabee 3D printers. If that's not an indicator of a run away exponential cycle I don't know what is. The cost of energy is falling, our ability to procedurally build things is growing and how long will it be until the raw materials become dirt cheap. Then there will be hardly any cost associated with creating objects.

There has been new advancements made with another parent-child 3D printer, the RepRap falls into the same category as the Portabee 3D printer, as it is manufactured almost entirely by a parent printer of the same design. The major shortcoming of these parent-child 3D printer relationships is the ability to only assemble structural parts and having to still buy/build separately the electronics which slows down the replication cycle and raises the difficulty of innovation. The RepRap has been taught to print wiring, this is something that more advanced printers have been able to do for a while, however doing this on the entry level printers is truly revolutionary. Imagine printing something any only having to install the circuit boards and motors to get a fully functioning whatever.