Drone delivery is maturing as tech giants like Alphabet’s Wing and Amazon Prime Air expand and startups expand too. Zipline has completed more than 500,000 deliveries since 2016, Flytrex will reach 21,350 deliveries in 2022, and Manna Drone Delivery is expanding into the United States.
A small startup called Flyby Robotics thinks there is room for improvement. Its approach is based on smaller and lighter drones with shorter delivery range but lower costs.
“Everyone should eat three times a day. We all love Chipotle, McDonald’s, and Cake Fill-A,” said co-founder and CEO Jason Low. “We can do that today. It’s economical. You don’t need a drone that costs like a Lamborghini to transport your burger.”
Flyby, a 10-person Los Angeles-based company that said Wednesday it has raised $4 million in seed funding, is part of a fleet of companies hoping to revolutionize the delivery business. If they succeed, you can get medicine, groceries, school supplies, power tools, and coffee from the air instead of the traditional delivery method.
There are a lot of obstacles. Technical challenges include designing aircraft that can withstand bad weather, fly at night, search for rendezvous and connection points, and avoid power lines. But drone delivery companies also need to clear regulatory hurdles, ensure safety and convince neighborhoods that small drones are worth the noise and privacy.
Flyby uses third-party drones but plans to eventually build its own, which is a common practice among drone delivery startups. It designed its own site-monitoring system, a winch weighing less than a pound, designed to lower food from 100 to 150 feet for a customer. Chief Operating Officer Cat Orman says that keeping drones loud, an approach Wing and Zipline also use, means drones are quieter — compared to how loud people are in a conversation.
Flyby executives are aware of the policy’s limitations; In fact, he met Lou Orman, his co-founder, in a class on drone policy at Yale. With smaller drones and a delivery range of 2 to 3 miles, Lu said, they hope to operate under proposed FAA Part 108 regulations with autonomous drones and ground stations that monitor local airspace.
And they have some allies. A one-month Flyby beta test, using a single drone that cost about $8,000, provided Nekter Juice Bar smoothies, MAD Greens salads, and Tokyo Joe’s sushi to residents of Mesa, Arizona, for $3. Customers ordered through the retailers’ apps, and employees loaded the food from a launch site set up in two parking spaces.
“Over the course of the pilot, we’ve learned that delivering food directly to our nearby guests without a car or delivery driver is possible,” said Nick D’Antonio, Vice President of IT for the Salad Collective. “It was exciting to watch our team and guests light up as they watched orders take off from the launchpad or be delivered from the sky to their homes.”
Next on the company’s to-do list is better autonomous navigation technology for drones and larger delivery testing.