Drones Deliver Green Transportation Option

By getting your next package delivered by drone, you could be saving energy, but only if companies deploy drones sensibly.

Lawrence Livermore researchers flew test campaigns with
two commercial drones and developed an estimate of
 the energy needed to deliver a package in various
scenarios. They also considered how battery technology
 and drone design will improve over time.

New research by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Carnegie Mellon University(link is external), SRI International(link is external) and the University of Colorado(link is external) at Boulder shows that drone-based delivery could reduce greenhouse gas emissions and energy use in the transportation sector. The research appears in the Feb. 13 edition of Nature Communications(link is external).

Drones have been used for years by the military and government, but using drones for commercial package delivery is becoming a new industry. Several companies are developing programs for package delivery using drones, including Amazon, Google, UPS and Deutsche Post DHL. The researchers set out to find if drone delivery is a promising idea for the environment or whether, like conventional overnight package delivery, it leads to much higher energy use and carbon emissions.

Read the Science and Technology Research News story - “Drones Deliver Green Transportation Option.”