Professor Sanjiv Singh, who runs a cargo delivery company called NearEarth, said that piloting a state-of-the-art drone was a little more like leaving it a trail of breadcrumbs: go to this altitude, perform this short task, go back home. But even short flights from a mobile landing pad pose serious logistical problems, he said. “They’re not proposing to deliver from one uninhabited place to another uninhabited place; they’re proposing to deliver from a warehouse to where the consumer is, which is likely an urban area,” he said. “There are going to be hazards along the way that the vehicle is going to have to detect. Maybe there will be terrain that the map doesn’t know about. Even then, maybe there’s construction equipment that wasn’t there 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 this is surmountable, 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