Dan O’Toole thinks his company can help clear up the supply chain backlog that is slowing factory work nationwide and threatening the arrival of holiday gifts.
But the founder and CEO of Indianapolis tech startup Dronedek, which makes smart mailboxes capable of receiving all kinds of products via drones, needs federal regulators to take one critical step first.
“Drone delivery is a key part of the solution now and in the future. We just need federal regulators to get out of the way and let us start working,” O’Toole states.
There has been some movement toward enabling more widespread drone delivery in the U.S., but the process is not fast or comprehensive enough, he says.
Companies that build delivery drones are cheering a recent move by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to relax certain restrictions over use of the flying machines in public airspace, saying the move improves the regulatory environment for package delivery operations.
The agency said in a statement the new rules mark “the next step in the FAA’s incremental approach to integrating unmanned aircraft systems into the national airspace system.” The process had begun when the FAA announced last December that it had relaxed its requirement for special waivers to allow the use of small drones “at night or over people.”
Despite the action, O’Toole said the still slow progress means the drone industry “is dying of a thousand paper cuts.”
O’Toole knows something about moving quickly.
Earlier this year, Dronedek – which was founded in 2019 – announced it is moving into an expanded headquarters in Indy at 4423 Shadeland Ave. and will grow its operations by hiring 85 people by 2025. That announcement came on the heels of a successful debut of its product at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Dronedek’s patented mailbox is capable of accepting a delivery from a drone and then storing the package securely – and keeping its content hot or cold. The mailbox can hold a variety of packages securely, including food and medication. Users, who are notified when a package arrives, use an app to open the mailbox for retrieval.
Dronedek is one of the first companies anywhere to focus on drone delivery for commercial and residential use. Its smart mailbox enables customers to fully automate their delivery process for the last mile. O’Toole secured patents for his mailbox ahead of the U.S. Postal Service and Amazon.
Now, O’Toole says he’s ready for the federal government to do its part.
“The FAA is not allowing drone delivery unless it’s in a visual line of site of the person controlling it,” O’Toole explains. “That severely limits the capabilities of this technology. The real gain is autonomous delivery. And we have the technology.”
Allowing autonomous drone delivery, O’Toole says, “opens a 24-hour delivery deck.”
“I understand this is the FAA wanting things to be safe, but it’s also a lot of bureaucracy,” O’Toole stresses. “The autonomous solution is not like going to the moon. They need to get us into hyper speed on this issue like they did with the coronavirus vaccine. The U.S. is falling far behind countries like Africa, Australia, Japan, India and China on drone delivery. The FAA has nudged things forward – now we need to get this to the next level.”
Small drones carrying deliveries of 50 pounds can travel at speeds of up to 60 miles an hour. O’Toole explains that with the charging station on Dronedek’s high-tech mailboxes, package-carrying drones can easily fly 15 to 20 miles away from the sender.
While parcel-toting drones aren’t filling the skies yet, it’s widely agreed that this scenario is imminently possible.
Already, firms like Flytrex, which specializes in food and other small deliveries, and Amazon’s Prime Air subsidiary recently have conducted successful test runs. Amazon recently received FAA authorization to fly on a test site, and hopes in the future to provide 30-minute maximum delivery times on at least some items.
O’Toole says he’s seen delivery times as low as seven minutes from the time of ordering to delivery in a pilot program in Virginia. The drones being tested in Blacksburg, Virginia, by Google’s drone-focused subsidiary, Wing, began by carrying packages of no more than three pounds. O’Toole notes that 95% of packages delivered to consumers are five pounds or less.
FedEx, Walmart and Domino’s Pizza also are experimenting with drone deliveries. The University of Maryland deployed a drone to transport an organ, and some drones designed for this purpose have been used in Africa. In Ghana, a company designed a drone that can make up to 600 trips delivering vaccines to 2,000 health care facilities on demand. As BBC reports, applications like this could be lifesaving because it would eradicate the long delays common in the medical industry.
“Drone delivery has the potential to be transformative,” O’Toole says. “It’s not only fast and efficient, it’s carbon neutral and takes [delivery] trucks off the road. That’s good for the environment and is helpful to delivery companies because there’s a serious driver shortage.”
As e-commerce captures a growing share of retail, it attracts increasing blame for adding to congestion and carbon emissions in urban areas.
“Drones will be a big part of the solution to finding alternatives to trucks and vans in handling that last-mile delivery,” O’Toole says. “But regulators have to let this technology take off.”
Anthony Schoettle is the director of communications for the Indiana Chamber. He started with the Chamber in 2021 after a long career in journalism. He’s won multiple awards for his storytelling ability on a wide range of business topics.
