In the vein of Amazon Prime Air, SingPost has begun experimenting newfangled ways to send your mail, by way of drones.
Their postal drone successfully completed their first test flight recently, carrying a payload of a latter and a t-shirt in a packet from Lorong Halus in Singapore to Pulau Ubin. In a trip that would have taken a long time manually (the ferry ride, especially) the test flight only took five minutes for the two-kilometre trip.
The drone itself was built by the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) Labs, which is said to be equipped with security and verification features that ensure that no random stranger can just take off with the drone’s payload. With a carrying capacity of up to half a kilogramme, the postal drone is able to fly up to a height of 45 metres and travel a distance of 2.3 kilometres.
Though it’s hardly something to brag about, SingPost boasts that the trial is the first time in the world a postal service has successfully used an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for point-to-point recipient-authenticated mail delivery. Don’t expect drones to send your mail anytime soon though — it’ll be a quite some time before SingPost can deploy the robots en masse, if they’re even planning to do that.
Photo: YouTube screengrab
