I feel like a few years ago all the rage was that Amazon and other retailers were going to deliver things via drones, straight to your doorstep
Food delivery companies as well seemed to be testing out robots that would bring your food to you albeit in a more sidewalk bound way
Its been a few years and I have yet to have a single thing drone delivered to my house
What happened to that alternate future? Are companies still working on it? Or did we move on from that idea for some reasons we discovered?
1. FAA regulations - delivery drones can't operate within X miles of an airport (technically they can, but it requires a much stricter degree of certification and compliance nobody wants to bother with)
2. Drones need a landing space, so people without yards (like apartment and townhouse dwellers, who make up a lot of the population in exactly the densely populated areas where you'd want to use drones to begin with) can't be served
And it turns out that once you exclude "houses within X miles of an airport" and "houses without an LZ", there aren't enough customers left to make delivery drones worth it.