00:00Now Amazon has become the first retailer in the UK to launch drone deliveries.
00:05Parcels are now being flown to people's homes in an area of northern England under a trial for a wider
00:10rollout.
00:11The retailer says it will mean small parcels can be delivered less than two hours after ordering.
00:17David Dunn is a professor of international politics at the University of Birmingham and author of the book Drones, Force
00:23and Law.
00:24David, thank you very much for joining us.
00:27Amazon has launched this drone project. From what I've seen, it's a very specific size and weight that can be
00:34delivered.
00:35And you have to have a backyard or a garden for it to be dropped into.
00:39What's your assessment of how successful it might be in the UK?
00:44Well, this is very much a trial of concept out of public acceptability for Amazon.
00:51It's going to cost them £50 per delivery, costs they won't recover in this trial.
00:56But it's actually about actually demonstrating that they have the ability to satisfy the customer demand, to do this safely,
01:03to do it in an effective way and to demonstrate to the public that the drones aren't going to frighten
01:09the horses, so to speak.
01:11All the humans, I was going to ask you about safety.
01:13Having multiple drones buzzing around over your head, dropping multiple parcels from quite a height, surely it presents challenges of
01:21collisions of drones, if it gets really busy, and possible harm from falling objects.
01:27And these concerns are very real, and the trial in Darlington has gone ahead on a smaller scale than Amazon
01:34wanted, partly because of those concerns.
01:36But again, Amazon are trying to prove the concept that they can do this cheaply and safely, without too much
01:42noise, which is a big concern for local residents.
01:45That they can do this in a way that actually avoids collisions, that the technology now is AI-enabled and
01:52very sophisticated, with sense-and-avoid technology built into it, with multiple streams of guidance from different satellites.
02:02So the drones have come a long way, and the law is now more accommodating for them.
02:09And the concept has been proved with deliveries for the health service and used by the police.
02:14So Amazon are confident that if they can actually show that this commercial application works in Darlington, then it will
02:23be rolled out more widely across the UK.
02:25Of course, China has really taken quite a lot of leaps with drone deliveries.
02:29What are the lessons that we can learn from them, and everything from how the industry is regulated to the
02:36practical issues of making these deliveries smooth and safe?
02:41Yeah, well, China has now actually scaled up drone delivery as well as drone manufacture, and they are very much
02:47leading the world in this area.
02:50And what they found is, unlike the trial in Darlington, where they've been delivered to individual gardens or yards, that
02:56the best way to do this is actually not to do it door-to-door, but to do it from
03:01the factory to a kiosk or a central place where the parcels can be collected from.
03:10Because that gets around the difficulty, not everyone has a garden, but actually in congested spaces and city centres where
03:17the drones are most attractive because traffic is snarled, then actually you have to deliver it to a central point
03:24and have people collect it from there, rather than trying to do it to each individual apartment.
03:28So that's very much what the Chinese have done, and they actually have got drones incorporated into many different aspects.
03:35The newer architecture, the newer build, the less concerns with heritage and public spaces, the less concern of public opinion
03:42about noise, are features that have allowed the Chinese to steal a march on the rest of the world.
03:48But they have improved the concept. It's those lessons that are being applied elsewhere, like in the UK.
03:54So I think it might be some time before the motorbikes and the cars and the trucks are replaced, but
04:00I guess we'll have to see.
04:01Things move very quickly these days. That's David Dunn, Professor of International Politics at the University of Birmingham, also author
04:07of the book Drones, Force and Law.
04:09Thank you so much for your time.
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