In Oranmore, a small town in County Galway, Ireland, you can now get a taste of a possible and instantly rewarding drone delivery future. In a recently announced partnership with Irish drone delivery company Manna, Samsung is promising to deliver its smaller electronics like phones and smart watches “in three minutes” when ordered by someone in Oranmore from Samsung’s Irish online store.
Manna uses “tailor-made aerospace drones” to complete deliveries, according to Samsung’s announcement. Drones’ ability to travel at speeds over 60 miles per hour (about 37 miles per hour) seems to guarantee these aggressive delivery times, although operating only within a two kilometer radius of your dispatch center is likely to help as well. .
However, Samsung and Manna are not exactly breaking new ground with their partnership. People who live in Oranmore may already be familiar with Manna’s drones delivering everything from groceries to medicines, thanks to an agreement that Manna signed with the Tesco supermarket chain in 2020.
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Both Samsung and Manna say they are “eager” to expand delivery service across the country, but outside Ireland, other companies have also been experimenting with drones. Amazon started testing its drones in the UK after receiving regulatory approval in 2016. In the US, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has also started approving other small-scale tests, such as a partnership with UPS and CVS to deliver prescriptions to a Florida nursing home and a Walmart race test in North Carolina.
All of these tests seem to be at the service of what begins to seem like an inevitable reality: the next day’s shipment is becoming more like the next minute’s shipment. Regulators need to agree on drone flight standards for this to happen, and in the case of the FAA, freedom of flight will require new identification systems to determine ownership. Everything may seem a long way, given the pace of the government, but, as this feat of Samsung, there are more and more examples in which this possible future is becoming the present.