Professor Sanjiv Singh, who runs a cargo delivery company called NearEarth, said that, to pilot a state-of-the-art drone, you simply give it some basic instructions: go to this altitude, perform this short task, go back home. But even short flights from a mobile landing pad could cause serious logistical problems, he said. “They’re not going to deliver from one uninhabited place to another uninhabited place; they’re going to deliver from a warehouse to the consumer, which will probably be an urban area,” he said. “There are going to be hazards that the vehicle is going to have to see. Maybe there will be terrain that the map doesn’t know about. Then, maybe there’s construction equipment that wasn’t there before but is there now. Maybe GPS signals are blocked, in which case it’s going to have an incorrect idea about where it is.” All these problems can be solved, he said – but it’s difficult.
What does Professor Singh think about fixing current drone delivery problems?
He thinks that it is possible to resolve these problems He believes the problems might be too difficult to fix He thinks that blocked GPS signals will be the hardest problem to fix He believes that his company will be the first to offer solutions to the problems