Debriefing: Pepperoni on a drone

Why no company has yet come close to actually delivering pizza by drone

On June 21, the Russian company Dodo Pizza announced the first commercial delivery of pizza using a drone - something that until recently seemed like a distant future. TJournal figured out whether the domestic chain of pizzerias really lies behind the championship, and how close the future really is with ubiquitous drones bringing food and other goods home.

What did Dodo Pizza do?

On June 21, the Russian pizzeria chain Dodo Pizza, together with the Copter Express company, delivered pizza using a drone. This happened in Syktyvkar, the Komi Republic - where the main office of the pizzeria chain is located (it operates in 15 other cities in Russia).

Using a drone, the company delivered the prepared pizza directly to a public park: having flown to the point, the remotely controlled drone hovered in the air and dropped the box down on a cable. Dozens of spectators watched what was happening, filming videos on their own smartphones and cameras.

However, on the ground, the box was picked up not by customers, but by a company agent wearing a special uniform and a safety helmet. Connecting to the base via radio, he controlled the descent of the box on a cable, and then, using a mobile application on the iPad, paid clients - some with a card, and some with cash.

The video looks strange: it’s not at all what one imagines after the phrase “pizza delivery using a drone.” Why was the box lowered down on a rope, rather than a drone landing on the ground? Why was an agent needed there if the client can independently pick up a box of pizza and “release” the drone to the base? Is this the first pizza delivery by drone in history? And yet, it’s 2014, why doesn’t it look so impressive?

There are different answers to these questions.

In their official press release, representatives of Dodo Pizza emphasize that this is the first commercial delivery of pizza using robots in history - that is, one in which the pizzeria earned real money from live customers. Dodo Pizza CEO Fyodor Ovchinnikov dismissed previous cases of pizza delivery by drone.

Experiments with copters by the American Domino's Pizza and the Indian pizzeria are staged commercials that have nothing to do with real delivery. Fedor Ovchinnikov, founder and CEO of Dodo Pizza

Dodo Pizza explains its innovativeness by its original business model: pizza is sent not by pre-ordering the client, but by choosing a crowded point - universities, beaches and parks. A flying copter and an agent in a branded overalls receiving a box floating through the air create a real-time show effect that attracts customers, the company claims.

Hovering drones with pizza became a joint project of Dodo Pizza and the Copter Express company. The latter dealt with technology: engineers created a lowering device, a special airbag with opening doors and a system for attaching a pizza box.

During the first day of drone delivery, Dodo Pizza completed 6 orders for a total amount of 3,270 rubles.

It is noteworthy that some publications have focused on completely different delivery options for Dodo Pizza, which are only being planned: supposedly, the order can be made by phone, and the pizza will be delivered to the address at home, identifying the owner’s access to the street using the built-in webcam.

Indian pizzeria at the center of scandal

An erudite reader will note: “This is not the first time pizza has been delivered by drone!” - and he will be right. On May 11, the Indian Francesco's Pizzeria in Mumbai performed a similar PR stunt: the company successfully delivered an “order” using a remotely controlled drone over a distance of 1.5 kilometers. It took just 10 minutes, although a typical pizza delivery in a populated city like Mumbai would take at least half an hour.

The drone delivered the pizza directly into the hands of a “client” located on an open area of ​​the roof of a 21-story building. The pizzeria published an impressive promotional video showing how the drone begins its flight just meters from the oven in which the pizza was cooked.

The words “order” and “client” are in quotation marks because the video was actually staged. The “client” turned out to be a friend of Francesco’s Pizzeria CEO Mikhel Rajani, so in fairness, what happened cannot be called a commercial delivery, notes the Times of India .

Moreover, commercial delivery using drones is generally prohibited in India. Mumbai police have demanded that the company provide permission from the civil aviation department to fly over such high objects, reports PTI . As Rajani assured the public, this was just a test flight.

According to company representatives, they tried to comply with the law: the drone flew at a permitted altitude of 80-150 meters, and also did not fly over high-security zones. In India, drones are mainly used for filmmaking, but Francesco's Pizzeria hopes that regulations will become looser in the next 4-5 years.

Domino's effect

Another memorable case of pizza delivery using a drone, which Ovchinnikov mentioned, is the story from the American chain Domino's Pizza. At the beginning of June 2013, the company demonstrated pizza delivery using a quadcopter and the company’s branded bag.

From the video it becomes clear that the quadcopter is also controlled by a real person (and not an automated system based on GPS and camera data, as we would like): the drone deftly flies around trees, maneuvering at different heights, and brings pizza directly into the client’s hands.

However, the video was just a concept developed within a British advertising agency. “Don’t expect hot pizza to be delivered to your door by drone in the foreseeable future,” CNN analysts noted. The problem was that commercial drone delivery was illegal in the US.

The soil sample, as it turned out, was taken back in May 2012: then the TacoCopter service appeared, promising taco delivery using unmanned drones and a mobile application. Many publications bought into the ingenious marketing move, including PCWorld and Cult of Mac , but the startup turned out to be just a concept.

As Wired found out, the project was invented by MIT graduate Star Simpson, who was once arrested for carrying a fake bomb made from green light bulbs and computer circuit boards on his body. According to Simpson, perhaps someday in the future such a project will be made a reality, but as of 2012 it was not feasible. To do this, it was necessary to obtain a license to use drones from the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which was practically impossible at that time.

Glimpses of Light and Amazon

On December 2, 2013, Amazon solemnly announced its initiative with drones. The new Amazon Prime Air service, it was claimed, will allow customers to receive goods within half an hour after ordering, and they will be delivered by specially designed drones.

The company admitted that the service is still at the stage of development and preliminary testing, and its implementation is possible only if the FAA softens regulation in this area. According to an optimistic forecast, the US Congress promised to resolve this issue by September 2015.

Then Amazon was obstructed by everyone who could. The Amazon drone now has a parody Twitter account, and others have been busy writing jokes and drawing photoshops, playing off the awkwardness of drones and calculating how the appearance of the familiar urban landscape will change with the launch of hundreds of quadcopters into the air.

I'm going to make San Francisco tourism photos very pretty come 2019 (h/t @danielpearson ) pic.twitter.com/mVYZidAiOM

— Amazon Drone (@AmazonDrone) December 2, 2013

eBay CEO John Donahue called Amazon's plans an unrealizable "distant fantasy," emphasizing that eBay is doing things that will improve the lives of customers today. Representatives of the video streaming service Netflix, which in 2014 is still delivering DVDs, ridiculed Amazon's plans in a parody video .

However, later critics had to sprinkle ashes on their heads. Back in late February, the FAA spoke harshly about the need to obtain permission for commercial launches of drones, and allowed their free use only for personal purposes and for demonstration of capabilities.

However, already in early March, the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) rejected the FAA's claim against one of the owners of the quadcopter: they wanted to fine him 10 thousand dollars for using the drone to film a commercial. With its decision, the NTSB made it clear: the FAA does not have the right to fine for the commercial use of drones, which freed the hands of many testers and companies.

In April, Amazon launched another service - a small device called Amazon Dash for ordering groceries and goods from home without using computers. And already in June, the FAA approved the first flight of a commercial drone in the United States - it turned out to be a BP quadcopter.

So what are our

In February, the Kommersant newspaper reported on an incident in Ulyanovsk: an unknown drone allegedly flew over the city at a speed of 500 kilometers per hour, forcing some aircraft to change course, and then disappeared from radar. Then the head of the Ulyanovsk air traffic management center, Nikolai Belov, said that “such an appearance of an aircraft in zone C poses a serious threat to flight safety and is punishable both administratively and criminally.”

In fact, Russian legislation, in theory, allows the flight of unmanned vehicles. The Russian government decree on the rules for the use of airspace contains the corresponding article No. 52.

The use of airspace by an unmanned aerial vehicle in airspace of classes A, C and G is carried out on the basis of the aircraft’s flight plan and permission to use the airspace.

The use of airspace by an unmanned aerial vehicle is carried out through the establishment of temporary and local regimes, as well as short-term restrictions in the interests of airspace users organizing flights by an unmanned aerial vehicle.

Simply put, if a “green corridor” is created for a drone, in which there are guaranteed to be no other aircraft, we can assume that the requirements for its operation have been met. Apparently, for this reason, Dodo Pizza fenced off the landing zone with special tapes and equipped its agent with protective clothing.

However, it is not possible to set up personal “corridors” with the mass use of quadcopters, and it is unknown what Rosaviatsia thinks about this. The founder of Dodo Pizza, Fyodor Ovchinnikov, in a conversation with TJournal, admitted that at the moment the commercial use of drones in the Russian Federation is not defined: “This is neither permitted nor prohibited. This is still a hole in the legislation.”

Until today, there have been no real cases of delivery of goods by drones in Russia, but theoretically it is legal.

But even if the necessary conditions are created from a legal point of view, the technical equipment of drones still does not provide a beautiful solution that allows pizza to be delivered fully automatically and without the participation of a human intermediary.

For now, the drone cannot fly to an unknown address. It's too dangerous. There may be radio interference that will disrupt the signal with the base, wires, and you also need to choose a landing site. Another point is eating pizza. We can leave pizza on the ground - now we are even testing special boxes with legs, but we have not yet come up with a solution on how to make sure that the pizza is picked up by the person who ordered it, and not by a random passerby. There are a lot of questions, so far we have found one model that works exactly. Fedor Ovchinnikov, founder and general director of Dodo Pizza

Fedor Ovchinnikov

The fact remains that no company in the world today will deliver pizza door-to-door—or window-to-window—using a drone. Not today, but in the foreseeable future.

I wonder what pizza feels like flying over the Earth,
Nikita Likhachev,
TJournal

No acoCopter #Star_Simpson #Federal_Civil_Aviation_Administration_USA #Rosaviatsiya