There’s been a little bit of chatter around the internet in the last few days about a ‘service’ named Tacocopter.

The idea is that drones can deliver tacos to your house but is a ‘private beta’ available to the ‘SF Bay Area Only’.

Sure thing.

According to the law, in late 2015 commercial drone services will be permitted to operate drones in the United States and the Tacocopter has certainly captured the imagination of some big publications.

The idea of drones delivering tacos is going to become a reality much sooner than many would expect. The technology is good enough and if they aren’t carrying humans, not too many people will be all that concerned about safety given the only potential injury will be to a hot pizza.

Marginal Revolution makes the point that drones are going to form significant competition to Driverless Cars and we agree, especially in the area of the final step of delivery – from distribution centers to houses.

The key bonus that drone delivery provides is privacy and security. Rather than delivery to your front door or front yard, those living in houses will be able to receive delivery into their backyard. As for those living in high rise accommodation, well… we can always hope:

Update: The Pirate Bay is developing systems to use drones to host data and broadcast pirate networks. You can’t deny their sense of mission, whatever that that mission actually is. With Tacocopters and Flying Pirate Drones,  imagine what the world will look like when the our best minds engage themselves with this area?

Following up on our post yesterday about the implications of unmanned drones; Singularity Hub brings us an article about the incredible rise of unmanned drones in the US military, representing 30% of aircraft flown!

Why is the population of drones rising exponentially in the US military? Again, the CRS numbers are very revealing. While representing more than 30% of the total aircraft flown, drones account for just 8% of the warplane budget. Nearly forty Predator and Reaper drones have crashed in Afghanistan and Iraq (with the loss of small UAVs like the Raven being considerably higher), yet the accident rate for Predators has dropped significantly in the past few years falling from 20 cases per 100,000 hours in 2005 to just 7.5/100k in 2009. That accident rate puts the Predator (and Reaper) on par with the F-16! And pilot lives are never lost in a drone crash. On a case by case basis, individual UAVs may or may not be more cost effective than manned planes for a particular mission, but as a whole they seem to be a better investment. In fact, the US is on track to spend $26 billion on drone R&D between 2001 and 2013. A small fraction of the total US military budget, but possibly the investment that may yield the highest dividends.

 

The implications for civilian development are huge and the infrastructure built to accelerate these developments will almost definitely advance the cause of driverless cars as well!

As discussed in my previous post, Google will probably be climbing all over unmanned drones for their mapping services. Remembering that one of the major costs of aviation is human resources, removing expensive pilots from the equation will completely open the field of air transportation.

More efficient flight is also being worked on, with the magnificent CAFE Foundation Green Flight Challenge (sponsored, of course, by Google). The winner of that competition achieved a passenger MPG of 403.5. Simply astounding – and the plane ran on batteries too.

Some further implications of unmanned drones:

Local Delivery- think of companies like UPS, Fedex, Dell and their ilk. They could load up planes and send them off without anyone at the joystick. I can also imagine that it would become more viable to move smaller loads – imagine your local pizza company delivering using a tiny helicopter. That’s a little off the wall, but not so much for courier companies.

Remote Delivery -A more realistic application is delivery of packages to remote workers, such as those on oil rigs or other environmentally harsh locations.

Mapping - a hindrance of driverless car technology is the lack of centimetre-perfect mapping available.  This would be quite expensive if done by cars at street level but if done by unmanned drones with much greater scope (and using those 1.8 gigapixel cameras I was talking about) the cost would drop and we’d be able to jump that hurdle a little bit faster.

Passenger Flight - Once umanned drones are proven, it won’t be a great leap for them to start taking passengers. This could see drone companies not only becoming major competitors for Southwest or American, but long-haul buses, trains and car-trips. Much shorter runways will be needed for them which makes it easier to dot them around a city. This will take a long time to come into effect, one would imagine.

Policing – anything that currently sees aerial use – from monitoring highways for speeding vehicles to pursuit of suspects will become cheaper with unmanned drones. This will probably mean we will see a profusion of these in the skies. Drones are currently used for policing the border but not much else.

Environmentalism/Social Activism – Monitoring of corporate or government activities will be a lot easier. I can see drones looking for whaling ships, loggers in the Amazon and more.

Satellites – the same bill which approved unmanned drones also talked about the use of satellites for much more precise navigation of aircraft. This won’t only benefit airplanes though – it will greatly benefit driverless cars to be able to achieve pinpoint precision on their location, in combination with the mapping service mentioned above.

Media – similar to the environmental activists, unmanned drones will give them much greater ease of use for monitoring events from the air.

On Monday, the US Senate passed laws which will enable the legal operation of unmanned drones for commercial use.

The legalization presents some complications which have major privacy issues. Basic drones are already quite cheap and can be of any size.

Imagine the police spying on people using cameras? Or how about sicko perverts using drones to spy on their neighborhood’s children? It’s actually quite likely that the new wave of unmanned drones that will fill our skies are going to present significant issues

How hard would it be for someone with deeper pockets to finance a drone with even more powerful surveillance equipment to monitor, well, who knows what? How will we know what purposes any private citizen has for deploying a drone overhead?

One obvious use is Google. They could potentially buy drones with 1.8 gigapixel cameras much like the US military has done and be able to provide much more detailed photos than currently provided in their mapping services.

I’ll follow this post up with a few potential ideas for applications of drones!

The US Navy is currently testing two unmanned Lockheed Martin/Kaman K-MAX robotic helicopters to deliver supplies in Afghanistan.  An entire Wikipedia article details the specifics of both the manned and unmanned versions of the aircraft.

Manmohan Bahadur, an Air Vice Marshal of the Indian Air Force (we’re guessing he knows what he’s talking about) has an article about the K-MAX in the India Times. In short he thinks the K-MAX is an unheralded, revolutionary technology.