The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked greater interest in the use of drones as an avenue for contactless delivery for many things, including essential medical supplies to doctors, health care workers and everyday citizens.
Drone delivery had been in development long before the pandemic began. For companies like Amazon, drone delivery wouldn’t just cut delivery times, it would reduce the amount of physical labor needed, too.
Drones have already been used in the healthcare industry and for disaster aid, mostly outside of the United States. For example, San Francisco-based drone delivery company Zipline is already at work in Africa reducing risk for people with chronic health conditions both during and prior to the outbreak of COVID-19.
Zipline delivers blood and medical supplies to hospitals and health centers in Rwanda and Ghana, and now wants to accelerate its plans for U.S. deliveries due to the pandemic. Other drone delivery companies and university researchers are looking at the U.S. market as well.
Government pushback
The Federal Aviation Administration has been strict in regard to drone usage in the country, placing strict regulations on what drone operators can and cannot do, and how they can and cannot fly.
John Walker, an aerospace consultant who spent 32 years at the FAA before opening up his own aerospace consulting firm, said in an article for NPR that public and governmental acceptance for drone delivery is likely to start with deliveries to hospitals.
This could allow more companies interested in drones to start delivering for the health care sector, and perhaps also lead to the greater acceptance of drone deliveries outside of the medical field.
Drone delivery faces tougher pushback in the United States because of the nation’s already congested airspace. So, the FAA is looking for something substantial to make the already-limited airspace real estate worthwhile.
“We haven’t seen the FAA be interested in a one-off approach,” says Susan Roberts, co-founder of AiRXOS, a General Electric subsidiary focused on drone infrastructure technology, in the same NPR article. “It doesn’t do anybody any good for a delivery company to be able to fly from two specific points if they can’t then scale that over and over again.”
Another roadblock to largely using drones for medical supply delivery is the amount of regulation that would be needed for widespread drone usage.
“First, drones will eventually need the equivalent of transponders to integrate them into the national air control systems,” says John Coglianese, the former U.S. Special Operations Command director, in an article for online news website STAT. “Second, ground-to-drone communications must be protected to prevent hackers from hijacking drones or using their data for nefarious purposes.”
Coglianese adds that using drones for essential purposes like medical supply delivery means that more issues need to be considered when planning to operate drones from long distances.
“Allowing drones to travel beyond the operator’s line of sight significantly increases the complexity and cost of pilot-to-drone communications,” he says, “and, medical drones must be especially robust and capable of fulfilling missions far beyond what we in the U.S. currently expect of hobbyists’ drones.”
While the weight of drone traffic on airspace is daunting, the FAA may be more likely to approve drone traffic if it’s financially viable – and even more so if they have the possibility to deliver essential supplies to those who need it, particularly during the pandemic.
Possible impact
While widespread delivery of medical supplies via drone could still be quite a way off, the impact that the ability to deliver essential medicine, supplies and lab materials to patients in need could be massive.
In the wake of the pandemic, drone delivery could mean that areas with large spikes in cases, or areas that are remote and far from hospital care could have necessary supplies and even lab work done, should people living in those areas fall ill.
Also, people who are especially at risk for COVID-19 could get their medical supplies delivered in a contactless way. Furthermore, in-need hospitals could request supplies from other hospitals that may have the essential PPE in more abundance.
“We are stocking a whole bunch of COVID-19 products and delivering them to hospitals and health facilities, whenever they need them instantly,” says Zipline co-founder and CEO Keller Rinaudo in an article for CNN Business. “Suddenly there’s a dramatic need to extend the reach of the hospital network and health care closer to where people live ... you can do that via instant delivery services.”
Some argue that, regardless of the potential impact of an increase in U.S. drone usage, any risk associated with that is greatly outweighed by how important it could be to have drone-delivered medical supplies during the current pandemic.
Robotics expert and University of Sheffield professor Noel Sharkey says in an article from the BBC that it could be possible to increase drone usage temporarily during the pandemic, and scale back after the COVID-19 crisis.
“In a global pandemic everything changes,” Sharkey says. “Rules and laws need to be manipulated and restrictions lifted to enable the use of all possible technological advantages to save large numbers of lives. The problem of course is how to wind back the clock on tech once we are out of the COVID-19 crisis.”
Emily Real is a contributing writer. Feedback welcome at feedback@cityscenemediagroup.com.
