Your Drone Mailbox is Coming.

This week a House Committee approved a measure which would end door-to-door mail delivery for fifteen million Americans. The bill would direct the U.S. Postal Service to convert the personalized door-to-door service to a less costly communal box delivery plan. The timing of this vote was coincidental as I’ve been thinking about drone delivery and the requirements of the future drone mailbox, the permanent “heliport” fixture which will allow for home drone delivery and will likely be scattered over suburban America by 2020.

When Amazon announced Prime Air last year, little specificity was provided on where and how your package would be delivered to your home (but don’t worry, it will be there in “30 Minutes”). The “Last Mile” is a term used in supply chain management which refers to the last leg (or mile) in the delivery process. Today, we think of the “last mile” as the UPS driver delivering the package to our front door. So what does the last 100 feet look like for drone delivery? Would the Amazon package be dropped on your front lawn, driveway, or on a Amazon drone landing stand? The thought of a parachute falling from the sky carrying the Zappo’s shoe order is a fun one to think about (so says my wife!) and reminded me of the Netflix Drone Commercial which followed the Amazon announcement.

For the drone delivery industry to evolve, specificity on the last 100 feet is required. Central to this issue is the drone landing station. So first, we need a cool name for this drone mailbox. Here’s a couple of ideas: DROBOX, DROPBOX (already taken), DROPORT, NEW MAILBOX, DELIVERYPAD, DRONEPAD … Okay, product naming is not my forte. For the purpose of this article, let’s call it DroneBox _tm … yes, that’s a trademark!

So what are the requirements of this Dronebox? What does it need to do?
1. The DroneBox needs to be owned by the homeowner, not by Amazon, USPS, or any other retail entity. Today, under US law, home mailboxes (even though they’re purchased by the homeowner) are technically the property of the USPS. It’s actually against the law to put anything other than US mail with proper postage in a mailbox. The homeowner’s ownership of the DroneBox will allow for control of which companies can and can not use it. Not all homeowner will want to receive a the “free, sample of CREST toothpaste” in their DroneBox.

2. There needs to be a Drone/DroneBox Communications Standard! The standard would establish a digital language such that drones and drone boxes could exchange data which could allow for device handshaking, authentication, package type identification, and a hundred of items which have yet to be thought of.

3. The DroneBox needs to be able to publish it’s GPS location with great accuracy. The United States government currently claims 4 meter horizontal accuracy for civilian GPS. This will allow the delivering drone to get close enough to the DroneBox to receive a beacon which will provide further specificity as to location of the center of the landing pad.

4. The DroneBox needs to be connected, an internet of things, right? As a result of it being connected to the internet, it can deliver messages to the owner (“You had a Drone Delivery from J.C. Penny at 3:45pm today weighing 2.3lbs with a tracking number of 2239048838. Your Drone Box is 16% full.”). Oops, that means it needs a scale too.

5. It needs to be secure and weather ready. You can’t have your neighbor coming over and stealing those new shoes (which you purchased 27 minutes ago). It probably should have a camera to record any unwanted visitors. And it needs to be enclosed as you can’t have the rain storm tarnishing those leather shoes!

So what’s it’s footprint and what does it look like? I don’t know. But the DroneBox is coming and will someday be as common as roof-top TV Antennas were in 1965! Send us your ideas/drawings/concepts and name and we will publish them as an update to this post.

Alan Phillips, Publisher
alan@dronelife.com