Just one more post about delivery drones, and then I promise I’ll stop for awhile. The opening of Alvin Powell’s Harvard Gazette interview with engineering professor Robert Wood, who sees not technical obstacles to such delivery systems but bureaucratic and legal ones:

“Harvard Gazette:

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos said he’s serious about using flying robots to deliver packages, saying that the technology is almost there — within four or five years — and that Federal Aviation Administration [FAA] regulations might permit it by 2015. What was your reaction when you heard this?

Robert Wood:

The technology is actually quite close. My first reaction is that the technology is much closer than overcoming the FAA and liability barriers. Of course they will need to refine the vehicle and controller designs to first ensure safety and, second, to verify efficiency and efficacy of this method.

Harvard Gazette:

How realistic is the scenario of using flying robotic drones to deliver packages? I’m sure it seems completely ‘out there’ for most of the public. Is it?

Robert Wood:

I think technically this is quite reasonable. In a laboratory setting, moving an object from one position to another using a flying vehicle is something that has been demonstrated. When you start to move this out of a lab setting, there are tremendous challenges, including weather, turbulence when moving around buildings or objects, dynamic objects in the environment such as people or cars, and imprecise or unreliable sensor information. But the robotics community is working on solutions to all of these topics — [like] the ‘self-driving car’ — so I suspect the answers are not far off.”