Drone delivery in the Villages starting soon
 

And I quote “America's largest retirement community can soon receive their prescriptions from CVS via a UPS drone delivery service”

Read all about it here -> UPS to deliver CVS meds via drone for largest US retirement community - Business Insider

Sounds like fun but hope the drone doesnt crash land into someones house

Covert operation..truth is they will be conducting social distancing surveillance

So drugs being dropped from the air, now the methheads, crack heads, druggie’s will be plucking them out like catching butterflies!:ohdear:

Cvs - ups - drone delivery of meds
 

Just received by me->


The following is being forwarded to you at the request of Richard Baier....


Dear Board of Supervisors, Board of Directors and Committee Members,

Please be aware that CVS and UPS will be profiling a service for medical package delivery by drone within The Villages. I have urged them (and they have indicated as much) to coordinate with Sumter County as they will be utilizing private Church property for such home delivery. Please know I am providing this information to you as an FYI as the Districts have no authority over the transport of such goods, however, you may get questions from residents. As indicated this service is to commence on or about May 7.

Richard

If it hits my palm tree, do I get to keep the pills? Asking for a friend...

It's going to scare the heck out of my elderly Driveway Dog. And it probably doesn't bring dog cookies.

I'm not too keen on the idea of having my drugs drop from the sky .............. but, until I fully understand how the delivery will be made I will not comment.

Fore!
 

If my golf ball hits a drone, will I get a Mulligan? :icon_wink:

UPS reached out to me in early March on this idea looking for information and some direction with The Villages. I had the pleasure of meeting with Fred Lopez the Director of Engineering for UPS Flight Forward Inc. several weeks ago to discuss this new venture and delivery here in The Villages. We spent the entire day riding driving around The Villages and surrounding areas discussing their plans, strategies, and the technologies needed to implement this delivery model. We also discussed the structure, governance, and political aspects of The Villages and how it differs from any other community in the country.

There are many aspects of this I don't feel it is appropriate to discuss publicly yet but I will share with everyone the basics.

UPS plans to launch their aircraft from a maned site adjacent to a CVS store. The aircraft would carry a package with multiple prescriptions for customers in a general area. The aircraft would fly over uninhabited areas to a given location and lower the package to an awaiting UPS employee. The final mile for delivery would be done by the person receiving that package to the various customers.

The aircraft would not land due to additional FAA constraints. The aircraft would not deliver directly to a person's home, there are many reasons for this safety and privacy being primary. The aircraft would not be flying over homes or occupied areas for safety reasons.

My overall impression of the response received by UPS from the district and developer was less than enthusiastic. I guess if the developer isn't in control and not getting a cut there is no support from them or the strings they pull, this is consistent with my own observations.

Will this be successful? Hard to say, there are a lot of kinks details to be worked out as well as determining the economic feasibility and viability of the concept. UAS deliveries will happen, that is inevitable, how long it takes to be successful will depend on both technology and the government bureaucracy response. My experience in the drone community is that the FAA is very sluggish and unyielding to paradigm changes and is extremely reluctant to let this technology move ahead as they will have near zero control as compared to current maned flights constraints.

It will be an interesting experiment to watch unfold.

This is only the beginning.......more deliveries of other stuff will follow in the years ahead. Amazon has shown that people will pay for convienence.

No, i hit a goose and did not get one. Just a dead goose

My husband did that too, at a vendors' day outing, and the groundskeeper got really angry. He said Like my aim's good enough to do that on purpose!


The next year they let him drive the beer cart.

The drone drops it off and a delivery driver finishes the delivery to the door......what's the point????




The drones will drop off prescriptions to a location near the community and a truck finish the delivery, UPS said

I thank Don for his insightful report on this drone delivery service. In many ways, this is a test to give everyone in the drone industry more true to life/real experience with using drones for delivery. Are you able to give us one of your drone videos of their delivery service when it starts?:icon_wink:

I agree, Thank You, Don.

Exactly. Complete waste of time.

I'm guessing it's just a small localized test of what they hope will scale into a much larger system if it ever gets off the ground (PUN intended) Kind of like the driverless cars with drivers or the many other companies playing with drone delivery services. It's obvious what they are doing wouldn't be their "final plan" but just a first step to see if it works.

To bad we wouldn't know what drugs each would be carrying because people could send up "drone interceptors." :)

Think of all the possibilities for dog walkers: Drone Walks Dog During COVID-19 Lockdown | NowThis - YouTube

No but if your ball hits a duck following the drone you will have to cook it.

Out of curiosity, what does "uninhabited" mean in this context? I live a couple of miles from a CVS but there are houses and shopping centers/businesses all along the way.

Was there any discussion of delivery fees?

This sounds like an "experiment" in the advance of Telemedicine using Smart Phones. This is a topic that has been casually mentioned but not well described in general. Could ultimately be used to diagnose, prescribe, order, deliver required prescription without leaving the house. The drone delivery is only one phase. Might be most beneficial in rural areas.

My eye care facility suggested the first phase recently (diagnose) but I opted out due to lack of understanding how they could perform any of the complex reviews (status of my macular degeneration, eye pressure, etc without expensive equipment and dialation). Going to facility Thursday and will question.

Some good questions, most of which I also asked Fred.
Yes, this is one of many exercises in getting "drone delivery" off the ground (I'll reuse the pun since it's already out there) as a business model. One of the big issues UPS, FedEx, and other delivery services deal with is the windshield time for delivery for the one-off deliveries (they have a special name for these that I've forgotten), these are expensive and time consuming and they are looking at UAS service as a way of reducing these expenses. The below video is an example of this:

UPS Tests Residential Delivery Via Drone - YouTube

This effort with CVS is focusing on a quick delivery approach. For example a half dozen prescriptions are ready for the Chatham area, these could be delivered to the final mile driver from the CVS in about 10 minutes who then makes the deliveries. After completing these deliveries they go to the Briar Meadows drop area and picks up the deliveries for there and then delivers them. This would continue throughout the day at various locations coordinated through software. Two low emission vehicles (golf carts) and a UAS could cover the deliveries from The Village of Summerhill to The Village of Woodbury instead of using multiple cars or trucks that would have to make multiple trips each day back to the store for pickups.

Another approach under consideration is the delivery to nursing home/assisted living facilities (roof top delivery) for daily and expedited deliveries using facility staff to receive the cargo and do the last-mile delivery.

The cost model is still a little unclear, the windshield time will be a huge savings but would be replaced by other costs. Will it be free or a premium service will have to be worked out. They are working hard to get their equipment costs down, right now a delivery drone costs nearly as much as one of the brown truck they use.

There is more sparsely populated and uninhabited areas around The Villages than most people realize. Flight routes would include over farms, golf courses, and utilizing power line routes. Their Part 135 certification gives them a lot more flexibility than is available to other sUAS operations under Part 107 certification and rules that others have to fly under, myself included.

There are a lot of things they are working out and will find even more issues as the service develops that will need to be worked out.

I am not a big fan of drones. Sure, they take nice pictures of areas, but they can also be an invasion of privacy. Delivery of drugs by drone. What next. Surveillance of your personal activities. Big brother is watching. Watch what your wish for. Only the opinion of a humble man.

"I have never made a mistake in my life. I thought I did once, but I was wrong."

You're watching too much TV, the stuff you see is fantasy, if they you hear them say "enhance that picture" that is where they start to make things up. There are only so many dots in the picture, you can't divide 1 dot into 10 and get more information out of it, but it does make for great TV drama. Flight times and ranges are very limited (<30 min.) and the aircraft are very noisy, I can hear mine clearly at 1000 ft distance and 400 ft high, and that's one of the quitest on the market. The UPS drones don't even have a camera on them, control is all done with flight telemetry and ground observers.

There will always be those with nefarious intentions that can't be controlled.

Seems like TV is a good place for experimentation.....self driving cars, drones, .... Robots next?..always interesting watching new technology...

This is vert interesting discussion and information. I sent an inquiry directly to CVS Health this morning with 7 questions and concerns, if I get a reply, I will post the results. Based on the above information, some of my concerns are mute, because I was going from the news article on television that was not complete. I never though about dogs in a yard. I did think about the someone following the drones for a possible intercept. Wonder what happens if the bad guy is armed?
While I can see advantages, I think there may be some bugs to be worked out.

Drone prescription delivery
 

Was reading that CVS and UPS have teamed up to start doing drone prescription deliveries in The Villages starting this month! Pretty cool way to help people stay inside.

I think I'd rather use the drive up window

Was discussed in detail by this thread (Drone delivery in the Villages starting soon)-> https://www.talkofthevillages.com/fo...g-soon-305816/

see post #11 & #24

Wonder how they will keep the drone in visual site by a human as required... Also the hesitation to embrace the idea may have something to do with liability. Seems new things always attract a team of lawyers ready to sue everyone.

I agree with all you wrote, Goldwing and love your videos and the lights you have in your screened in space. Thanks for all you do.

Line of site is not required. They are operating as an airline under Part 135 not a sUAS under Part 107. Under 135 they have more requirements prior to takeoff but less restrictions when airborne than 107. This is also why they will lower the package to a wait employee instead of landing; if the land then they need a licensed pilot rated on that aircraft to do the preflight checks prior to taking off again.

The drones they fly are quite a bit different than the one I fly. With 6 or 8 props they can sustain a loss of up to 3 props/motors and still complete their mission and return home. For me (and any other) with 4 props, a loss of one and Newton wins.

Unfortunately, drones use 10x more energy than delivery vans:

Delivery drones will use 10 times more energy than vans around town

Did you not read the entire article or just forgot the part "Naturally, energy usage isn't the only thing to consider; there's the cost of staffing, the fact that electricity generation creates less pollution than diesel automobiles, driver pay rates, maintenance, downtime for battery charging and many other factors. But on a purely environmental analysis it seems electric vans are by far the best solution for or getting a lot of things to a lot of tightly packed places, efficiently and quickly:. There is never just one factor to consider.

One of the reasons they make shot guns is if one of those things flys low over ones house.

Interesting article but only half the picture and the study was of a very limited scope. The assumption in the article is that the UAS (drone) being used is a vertical flight only aircraft (much like a helicopter), while very versatile their lift system are, as the article points out, relatively inefficient. This design, while versatile, greatly limits the range of the aircraft due to battery capacity limitations. All of the companies looking to develop UAS based delivery systems know this and take this into consideration.

All (including UPS) are looking at, developing, or are using VTOL aircraft which takeoff and land vertically but once airborne transition to a fixed wing flight mode, like the MV-22 Osprey. While takeoff and landing is done with brute force, once airborne and transitioned to horizontal flight the energy demand is about 5% (or less) of the requirements for takeoff and landing. Very long distance flights are possible (>100 miles) with these aircraft. However, even on shorter flights the energy savings are tremendous. Vertical flight operation is only needed for takeoff, landing, and delivery, perhaps 2-3 minute of the entire flight. This alone negates the majority of the argument the article attempts to make.

The article also assumes a non-feasible delivery model of the UAS delivering to each house. The flight logistics of this model are incredibly complex, difficult to manage, and would necessitate a complex (and expensive) aircraft design to manage delivery of each package. This is not the model UPS is using.

For the sake of argument I can discuss the capabilities of my Phantom 4 Pro aircraft in a delivery model. With the normal high capacity LiPO battery it uses (89.2 watts/hrs) the P4P can carry a 2 lbs payload (about 10 prescriptions) a distance of 5 miles at 400 ft altitude, land and deliver the payload, takeoff and return to its starting point with 15% battery capacity remaining. To put that into perspective that would be sufficient to make a delivery from the CVS at 466 and Belvedere Blvd to just about anywhere in The Villages between SR42 and CR466A, including the east side of 27/441. This is of course under ideal conditions of zero winds and peak battery capacity. While such a flight would be theoretically and technically possible it does not leave much safety margin and would require multiple waivers under Part 107 rules. Under Part 135 rules that UPS is flying under it would be completely legal.

While I haven't and wouldn't undertake such a flight, empirical data supports the feasibility with such a flight with a current high end consumer drone with about 80 watts of power. The custom designed UAS UPS will be employing are capable of much more and in a safer manner.

Go for it!
You'll need to move after doing it, but not far, Coleman USP is right near The Villages. Interfering with the operation of an aircraft, including a drone/UAS is a felony offence (18USC32) with a prison term of up to 20 years. It is treated the same as if you tried a similar stunt on a commercial aircraft. The FAA takes this very seriously.

The US Supreme Court ruled in United State v. Causby (1946) that the land owner does not own or control the airspace in the "immediate reaches above the land" and that sole control of the airspace belongs to the federal government unless otherwise delegated by the controlling federal agency.

Just remember, if it's low enough for a shotgun to take out then it's also low enough for the camera on the drone to clearly see you, and the operator not only get a live feed back at their remote controller that is recorded there, it also has a GPS/GLONASS system accurate to within about 6 inches that is also continuously reporting the aircraft's location to the operator. Those that have tried such a stupid stunt have a very low success rate of outwitting and eluding law enforcement and the FAA.

So go ahead smart guy, take a shot, I dare you to.