One day, late-night pizza orders could be airlifted directly to your front door.
For the past decade, humanity has taken some very promising steps towards its planned technological utopia. We can now download any form of entertainment through wireless connections, and even virtual reality seems to be right around the corner. Food services like pizza delivery, however, haven’t developed this century beyond placing your order in the back seat of a car. Thankfully, someone at Domino’s Pizza has thought of an improvement to the traditional “pizza-to-home” formula. In partnership with creative agency T + Biscuits and drone developer Areosight, Domino’s has unveiled “The DomiCopter”, an octacopter designed expressly for flying pizza directly to your front door.
While very much in the prototype stage, the DomiCopter is fully capable of delivering two large pizzas across a four-mile radius in ten minutes, bypassing potential traffic with little difficulty. This particular prototype was operated by a trained drone pilot, but one can also imagine an automated GPS system taking over the process. “If anything, it went quicker than a pizza boy,” said T + Biscuit’s founder Tom Hatton. “We were amazed at how easy it was going to be.”
In all seriousness, we probably shouldn’t expect pizza-delivering drones to become common anytime soon, if at all. Governments in the US and UK tightly regulate commercial drone use. For example, it is illegal to fly drones within 150 meters of congested areas in the UK, so this prototype spent most of its time over open farmland. These laws are expected to be revisited by 2020, but in the meantime, the DomiCopter will receive further testing at Domino’s UK headquarters, where the company hopes to increase its payload to carry additional items like pop bottles.
Source: T + Biscuits, via Yahoo
