Delivery Drones - Just a Hype? Towards Autonomous Air Mobility Services at Scale

Abstract

While hype often arises around emerging technologies, delivery drones have received a significant share of attention in recent years. A variety of applications for drone networks formed, from delivering medical goods to drone-delivered pizza. Nevertheless, high expectations did not yet result in a widespread deployment of drones to improve logistic networks. We conducted semi-structured interviews with drone and aviation experts to derive a structured overview of challenges for autonomous drone operations and gain practical insight into promising solution approaches that could transform the current hype into sound business models. Our findings comprise a multitude of operational, technical, social and legal issues that have not been identified in literature. Societal adaption and the development and interaction with AI-based systems pose a major challenge to provide autonomous air mobility services in the near future.