So a Pizza delivered to your doorstep using a drone, uh!
Jeff Bezos (Amazon C.E.O) must be one guy that watches countless science-fiction movies I guess. He had this crazy idea years back that someday people will be able to order things online and have them delivered by a small unmanned aerial vehicle (drone).
Currently, Amazon is working on a cool Project called the Amazon Prime air which is going to be able to do just that. According to latest designs, the Prime air is an Octopter capable of delivering small packages of not more than 3Kg to any destination within a 15Km radius from any of the hundreds of bases in America in less than 30 minutes. Using GPS, this device will be able to pinpoint the actual location of its destination. How cool is that? Very cool! Most of Africa suffers from poor housing plans and roads making it difficult to locate customers exact address. This is one of the most daunting challenging that local Amazons have to overcome. However, a drone armed with the GPS coordinates of the recipient won’t have to bother with Kampala’s notorious potholes or poor house address system to deliver packages to users on time.
Conventionally, drones have been known to be used in war-areas to spy or fight remotely but Amazon is trying commercial use for these aircrafts. If cleared by the FAA, we could start seeing these drones in the air space in 2 years time.With this innovation, Amazon hopes to cut down on the cost of courier services and make sure orders are delivered to the customers in the shortest time possible.
However, this like any other nice ideas comes with numerous challenges. Some obvious ones include; how will the crafts be able to ensure that the right person gets the package? Secondly, how will they be able to maneuver through the busy skies without collisions with other flying objects and bird? And thirdly, how reliable and secure are these drones? Imagine if someone orders for pizza then someone else equally hungry shoots the drone down and eats the pizza on its way to deliver the pizza! Very annoying, right?
However, this innovation is not about to get to Uganda, at least not in the next few decades. For the numerous restaurants delivery-men that deliver orders on Boda Bodas (motorcycles taxis) , the Amazon prime air is not about to render them jobless. In fact, one food delivery internet company — helloFood — is already using Boda Bodas to deliver food orders to its customers on record time. These Boda Bodas are terribly well known for beating Kampala’s crazy jam and yes they will find your home address that’s “behind some mango tree, next to Mama Frank’s shop, besides the green gate” because of their strong local knowledge.
African innovators might not have to turn sci-fi into reality like Jeff Bezos partly due to resource constraints. They might just have to wittingly use whatever resources are within their means.
Feature Image: Monitor
Discover more from Dignited
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Using boda bodas to make deliveries works really great in Uganda. Some one should commercialize their boda boda fleet just for this application. Online shopping will soon become the standard