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Delivering the goods: Drones and robots are making their way to your door

These four-wheeled robots navigate sidewalks and even crosswalks taking food to hungry college students. “This is the future,” said Kiwibots CEO Felipe Chávez.

It’s a real-world test of robot delivery that sometimes collides with reality. 

The reality today is that delivery is a bigger business than ever. With online shopping, it’s estimated the U.s. Postal Service, FedEx and UPS will process, sort and deliver more than two billion packages between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve. Amazon’s own fleet of delivery trucks is expected to handle 275 million holiday season shipments.

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And Amazon is pushing the delivery envelope, offering Prime members free one-day shipping.

Anne Goodchild, director of the Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics Center at the University of Washington, said companies find they must offer free delivery now to be competitive. Yet, it is expensive to deliver stuff: “Yeah, and it’s never free, right? It costs money. The question is, where do you get that money from?”

The growth in home delivery is focusing attention on what logistics experts call “the last mile.”

“They don’t mean literally a mile; they mean the last piece of this supply chain,” Goodchild said. “And the reason it’s interesting is it’s the most expensive mile of the whole thing. I’ve seen estimates of more than 50% of the cost is from that last mile. So, it’s expensive because it’s labor-intensive. There’s a driver who takes every package up to the front door.”

It’s estimated that free shipping will cost Amazon more than a billion dollars this quarter alone. Which explains why shippers are looking at some radical new technologies to cut the cost of the last mile.

Matthew Sweeny, founder and CEO of a delivery drone startup called Flirtey, believes his delivery drones will be delivering to homes all across America. He invited correspondent John Blackstone to Flirtey’s site to witness the drones being tested. “We’ve been secretly testing this technology in the desert for years, and this is the first time a film crew has come out and see it,” he said.

He predicts that by Christmas 2020, many packages will be delivered this way: by an airborne drone lowering its payload to the ground. Sweeny opens the package left by the drone: Two Flirtey shirts and a Flirtey mug.

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