ISTANBUL, Turkey (September 19, 2016) – Unmanned Life and Prime Competence announced, at the Postal Innovation Platform Conference, the place to be for all key actors in postal innovation, that they have started the pilot deployment of the world’s first autonomous drone-based sorting center for Post NL. It’s time for disruptive innovation in the postal and e-commerce logistics sector and the enthusiasm this proposal found in Istanbul represent another proof of that.
Drones are once again at the top of the news in e-commerce, but this time not for postal delivery. Unmanned Life and Prime Competence join forces to design for Post NL, one of the top 5 postal operators in the world, the world’s first autonomous drone-based postal sorting center. Prime Competence will provide overall program management, process auditing, technology assessments combined with Unmanned Life’s multi-patent pending innovative solution of a fully autonomous drone fleet managed through a SaaS platform over the cloud.
In a first for the industry, the Unmanned Life and Prime Competence joint initiative will introduce a combination of drones and autonomous ground vehicles to be used indoors for postal sorting. The Dutch and British companies are attacking the booming e-commerce market at its weakest point: making sure that sorting capacity and delivery go as fast as the consumer buys online. They expect that, at the end of the pilot initiative, it will be demonstrated that autonomous drones can rapidly and accurately perform the sorting at a higher throughput and lower cost per sorted unit than the current industry standard.
Eddy Thans, CEO Prime Competence comments “We are very excited about this project and its potential; for the first time in decades, technology facilitates a new way of approaching sorting that offers ultimate flexibility and scalability without the huge capital investment required by traditional sorting solutions – a factor that is holding back development in a rapidly changing business and consumer e-commerce environment. We commend Post NL for their commitment to innovation and proving the potential of autonomous sorting for the benefit of the broader postal industry. The program will involve several fields of technology, from sensors, vehicles, data transmission and software management platforms. We are pleased to have Unmanned Life as a key technology partner on this program; their autonomous drone fleet management technology represents a huge step forward in making this dream a reality”
The advantage of autonomous drones that are fully controlled by software alone is that there is no need to recruit, train and manage pilots. Software-controlled drones are safer, more reliable and offer an on-demand scalable solution at a much lower cost. “We are a Fourth Industrial revolution company building the next generation of industrial automation. Our solution has the advantage of being flexible, scalable and much cheaper than the usual conveyer belt used in the distribution centers. It can take tens of millions of euros and up to 3 years to build such centers. With Unmanned Life’s solution and Prime Competence’s recognized expertise in the sector, we are going to revolutionize the way sorting is done today” said Kumardev Chatterjee, CEO and Founder of Unmanned Life.
The two companies affirm you won’t need to be an Amazon to unlock the value of autonomous drone-based solutions in logistics. Autonomous sorting will be available to all postal operators and e-commerce players creating a level-playing-field for e-commerce companies.
ABOUT UNMANNED LIFE
Unmanned Life is the world’s first fully cloud based software-driven platform (ADBS) enabling an autonomous fleet of integrated drones and ground vehicles, aimed at disrupting logistics and other human-labour heavy industries. We enable the 4th Industrial Revolution by replacing heavily human- centric operations at the heart of large industrial sectors with our fully software-driven autonomous fleet of drones and ground vehicles (logistics, postal, surveillance, construction, shipping, oil and gas, aid and entertainment). Our ADBS platform enables to run these operations much more efficiently and at a significant lowered cost.
We already have postal drones. They’re called management, and the higher ups rule everything, taking all quality control and local input out of the hands of those who know their individual offices the best and demanding instead that everything be operated on numeric projections.
DOIS is the city carrier management “tool” that has become the source of harassment and abuse for thousands of hapless carriers, who are held to the expectations of a computer program that routinely fails to give full credit for the work it receives and then estimates how long each route should take, from office to street work, down to the damn minute.
Of course, management has, despite the contract provision that prohibits them from using this guesswork as the sole means of discipline and harassment/abuse, made working conditions in some places damn near intolerable.
Among the stuff DOIS doesn’t allow for:
1) Prepping swings for carriers who need auxiliary assistance
2) Wildly inaccurate records of flat and letter volume and parcels by supervisors who are trying to intimidate carriers to do work in less time than what they need.
3) Short changing on casing time for flyers that aren’t full coverage or are out of sequence. The time DOIS gives for example for casing a set of flyers might be 14 minutes, when it takes 25 minutes to do the task no matter who is casing or how fast they go, so in this case the carrier is 9 minutes “over in the office” and subject to being grilled when the supervisor knows damn good and well they put in false data. This is like getting knocked down by the neighborhood bully and hitting his little sister.
4) Weather and/or traffic DOIS only uses volume for its guesstimates, and no matter what the weather, or getting caught in after school or holiday traffic or construction or other factors like having mailboxes frozen shut are ever considered or deemed as legitimate reasons for missing the projected time. Of course when you’re in a district office sitting in the air conditioning on your fat ass or in a nice warm building in the winter, you play with the fucking numbers and try to force carriers to be unsafe, discourage taking heat breaks, although they’ll never say it, waiting instead to demand why you “went over” the next morning when you have a set of circulars and it’s 100 degrees with 100% humidity.
So drones in the U.S. Postal service? Good luck with that one. They already can’t operate the GPS system worth a damn, and can’t schedule mail volume evenly. Pretty much they screw up everything except their bonuses and nepotism where buddies promote each other regardless of competence or lack thereof. And I might remind them there are a lot of gun owners only too happy to practice on the drones.
how about drone supervisors?
More like how drones will take your job away !