Walmart

A Walmart in Farmington, Arkansas serves as a DroneUp delivery hub.

Walmart has started using drones for some deliveries, and Arizona is one of six states the retail giant has picked to give the program a trial run; the others are Texas, Utah, Virginia, Arkansas and Florida.

In announcing the expansion of its partnership with DroneUp, the company says customers can order tens of thousands of items and have them delivered by drone in as little as half an hour.

Tasha Keeney is the lead analyst on autonomous technology and robotics strategy at ARK Invest and says drone delivery could turn out to be disruptive to the market.

ARK Investments

Tasha Keeney

“I think what Walmart’s doing is cool in that it’s getting something to market with what’s available now,” Keeney said. “It’s getting the minimum viable product out there. The hope would be that the beyond line-of-sight approval happens, which would make it so that you don’t have to constantly watch the drone and which would bring down the cost pretty significantly in the future.”

That would require a change in the Federal Aviation Administration’s rules that say drone operators have to keep their drones in their lines of sight. Doing away with that, or getting a waiver, would allow for longer flights.

Keeney says a drone could deliver a package for as little as 25 cents, and that within the next decade, they could do a meaningful share of e-commerce. She also thinks e-commerce could account for up to 60% of all retail in that time; it was a little less than 20% as of 2020. But she says it might not be for everyone, everywhere.

“This type of autonomous technology will be really impactful for more rural and suburban areas, as opposed to something like autonomous cars, which I think will dominate urban transport,” Keeney said.

Keeney says drones will be a bigger deal in areas that don’t have the best delivery app options, so whether your purchases come by air or ground will likely depend on your geography.

“We can picture that in some shape or form, whether it’s goods being delivered to us or it’s traveling in the vehicles themselves, autonomous electric technology will completely reshape consumers’ lives over the next 10 years,” Keeney said.

Keeney says Arizona has been a pretty forward looking state when it comes to autonomous technology, especially passenger cars. And since she says drones will be pretty highly regulated, local laws and conditions will be important considerations for businesses to figure out where it makes sense to use them, and where it doesn’t.

Arizona State University

Troy Rule

Troy Rule, a professor of law at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, agrees there are a few reasons why Arizona seems like a good place to roll out this kind of program.

“One is that we have relatively stable weather here — we don’t have a ton of rain or sort of stormy weather … that might be a factor. Also, I think that politically we’ve proven as a state to be somewhat more open to some of these experimental or new technologies, whether that be for instance the Waymo and the autonomous vehicles on ground,” Rule said. “We are a bit of a tech center; we have the growing tech. corridor down in the Chandler area. So I think there are different sort of political and sort of geographic aspects to Arizona that might make it appealing for something like this.”

But Rule acknowledges Walmart — and other retailers who also want to use drone delivery — will likely face some challenges.

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Source: https://fronterasdesk.org/content/1805749/walmart-delivery-drones-may-be-coming-arizona