By Àlex Gutiérrez Páez |
Montevideo (EFE).- “Is it a bird? It is a plane? No, it’s a delivery drone.” This is surely going to be one of the most recurring pranks on the Uruguayan streets at the end of the year, when the first ‘delivery’ drones circulate through the sky carrying food, medicine and other light products.
After becoming the first company to be able to make deliveries with drones in the South American country, Drone.uy is testing packages of between two and five kilos at the Technological Laboratory of Uruguay (LATU), where this futuristic idea is becoming a reality.
For now, drone shipments are only carried out with collaborating companies, but the company’s intention is to test them in the coming months in some private neighborhoods and open the business in different Latin American countries in the coming years.
More democratic and green distributions
“It is a system that reaches and democratizes society, because it makes services reach you that were not reaching you before,” said Diego Silva, co-founder of Drone.uy, in an interview with EFE, who believes that this new ‘delivery’ works ” very well” in isolated communities.
The operation is simple: a person generates an order through an application, an automatic route is created to the place where the drone platform is located, which flies between five and seven meters above the ground and, when it reaches its destination, he lowers the package down a cable, drops it, and returns to his base.
Silva points out that another of the benefits of ‘delivery’ with drones is that it is “greener”, since three delivery aircraft a year would mean “a ton of carbon dioxide that is not being sent”.
“That interests us: having adequate logistics for what people want, that is, clean deliveries and without creating problems within the city”, points out the programmer, at the gates of his project going into action at the end of the year. , at the moment in some gated communities.
From leisure to business
The adventures of Silva and his partner and also co-founder of Drone.uy, Marcos Mujica, started in 2015 with racing drones, a new technology that caught their attention and with which they soon discovered a whole range of market possibilities.
“We brought the first drone thinking of it as a new camera in the air, but soon we began to see the business verticals that existed: agriculture, inspections, the ‘delivery’ system…”, indicates the co-founder of Drone.uy , which finally saw a business opportunity in shipping products to remote areas.
The fact that delivery systems are transport in the air and that there are no precedents in Latin America led to “many obstacles” at first, since they required “different attention” and coordination with the National Directorate of Civil Aviation and Aeronautical Infrastructure, which in 2016 authorized Drone.uy to make shipments with drones.
So will, at least initially, the cost of the drones – about $15,000 each – and the prices, which are currently estimated to be around $8 per shipment.
“Like all new and disruptive technology, it is an expensive service,” Silva points out.
Pioneers in Latin America
Aware that Uruguay is a flat country, Silva and Mujica see that their project could be attractive in other Latin American countries with more relief and, therefore, with more difficulties in supplying themselves with basic products.
The problem lies in the regulation, because with the exception of Uruguay received the first commercial authorization and delivery to people, the rest of the countries in the region are “far” from achieving these regulatory advances.
“The first thing that needs to be promoted from Latin America is regulation, which will be a reality this year in Europe and the United States is already developing different tests with Amazon and Google,” Silva emphasizes.
Once Silva and Mujica’s drones are a success in private neighborhoods, the intention of both partners is to develop an exit ‘hub’ from the shopping center in different neighborhoods to deliver their products to the entire population.