Food Flown to Your Doorstep
Robots just make for far better delivery drivers than people, especially if they can fly. But are they as good at building up your appetite?
Drones are cheaper than cars. They don't require wages, breaks, or much mental processing to figure out where they need to drop off the delivery. And perhaps by using them, food delivery companies could finally earn some profit.
A drone could bypass roads, simply soaring across the sky until it reaches its destination. Using distance detection and artificial intelligence, it could perform a soft landing. Then your phone pings, alerting you that your delivery has arrived.
Customers’ payment details can be logged, so that if they attempt to steal or damage the robot, the company can claim money for reparations. Since the drone will have its cameras rolling, they can detect and flag up if any criminal activity. And when mass markets start to embrace robotic delivery, manufacturers will produce more of them, driving down their value and detering potential criminals from attempting this in the first place.
High-end commercial drones can carry up to 30kg with speeds of around 100km per hour. Such a drone can carry 100 pizzas and zoom across the length of an American football field in under half a minute. And being free from significant traffic and impervious to most geographical barriers means this speed can be sustained from start to finish. But this could actually be detrimental to the interests of the customer.
Waiting for your food to arrive builds up anticipation and makes the experience far more pleasurable when you finally dig in. In many cases, drones can cut down the delivery time by a factor of 10 or more. That build-up time is lost. It could become just another trivial service none of us think twice about.
We all pop open YouTube and Netflix, flicking between different sources of entertainment in a matter of minutes. If we do the same for food, the whole experience may become blanched, leaving us in a state of ongoing grazing. Leaving us our palattes less acute and diminishing our appreciation of different cuisines.
To solve this, the delivery service can make drones deliberately wait, before they actually drop off your goods. On your app, it simply tells you it's on its way, even if it's only going to lift off in half an hour. It sounds ridiculous on paper, but in a time where sensory gratification is everything, businesses will look to maximize it by adding artificial delays.