Pizza, Express - Flying Delivery Bots

The Internet of Flying things takes another step forward. Dan Shapiro's article here looks at the developments in copters:

The Tacocopters are coming. Sure, the original pitch was a clever troll aimed at credulous and impatient fast-food junkies. But the numbers don’t lie – a typical taco weighs less than a pound, and aircraft that can autonomously fly a few dozen ounces of payload to your doorstep are already available for around a thousand bucks. Amazon Prime is cool, and I can’t wait for self-driving delivery cars – but there’s a reason they call a beeline a beeline. Flying autonomous deliverybots are coming. Fast.

Lest you doubt the logistics, the Hong Kong based hobbyshop of wonderment, Hobbyking, recently sponsored a contest called “Beerlift 2012″. While the contestants mostly used water as a standin for the bubbly, the winner, Romanian pilot Muresan Alexandru Camil, lifted over a hundred pounds of liquid – meaning that deliveries of entire beer kegs are not out of the question [57kg to be exact - but see this video we published earlier of one lifting a man]. While his massive octocopter looks like quite an endeavor, American David Ditch lifted a respectable 50 lbs with a 2-foot-square quadcopter – enough for quite a few Taco Bell Doritos Locos to your door. 279 of them, if you’re counting.

Dan has an expanded discussion on the sorts of roles various other flying devices may have, but if you read this article in association with this one as well (allowing many bot-copters to interact via internet comms) you can see that teh Internet of Flying Things is going to be very interesting. (To summarise - in the last few years, battery power has gone up and processing and motor power/weight has gone down enough for affordable robot aircrafat to be near commodities. I'd be surprised of airforces use manned fighter aircraft in a generation)

Blend that in with the remorseless trend towards online ordering, and one wonders if we will move back to 100 years ago, where every local shop had a delivery lad on a bicycle - except now its going to be bots.

Update - this video of highly manouverable aeroplanes is a reminder that it may not go all the robocopter's way