Royal Mail has begun using drones to deliver post in the Orkney islands, helping pave the way for drone deliveries to islands around the UK and on the mainland during emergencies. The service between the village of Stromness on Orkney's main island to the nearby islands of Hoy and Graemsay, using aircraft able to carry up to 6kg, is Royal Mail's first permanent drone delivery service. Using drones allows Royal Mail to provide a faster and more secure delivery service to islands such as the Orkneys, avoiding ferries or scheduled air services subject to weather cancellations, tides and timetables that do not suit the postal service. Royal Mail has been testing and evaluating drone services on Scottish islands for some time, as has the NHS, which has trialled their use for flying urgent medical samples from the small Hebridean islands of Coll and Tiree. Chris Paxton, the head of drone trials at Royal Mail, said these flights were far faster and more efficient, and helped cut carbon emissions.

The US Postal Service is facing more than just stern warnings over its decision to buy mostly gas-powered mail delivery trucks. Environmental activist groups (including the Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club) and 16 states have filed lawsuits in California and New York State to challenge the Postal Service's Next Generation Delivery Vehicle purchasing decision. They argue the USPS's environmental review was flawed and illegal, ignoring the "decades of pollution" the combustion-engine trucks would produce. The USPS allegedly violated the National Environmental Policy Act by committing to buy 165,000 delivery vehicles (just 10 percent of them electric) without first conducting a "lawful" environmental review. The service only started its review six months after it had signed a contract, according to the California lawsuit.

"At the pandemic's peak, most of the time-series models in production failed to see the sudden surge/drop in demand." What's one thing that is common between logistics and machine learning algorithms--optimisation. Cost optimization, inventory management and many other aspects of a delivery pipeline generate a stream of complex data. AI offers tools that can tackle this kind of data. While the pandemic has disrupted the supply chain, the logistics industry is bracing for a different type of disruption--Artificial Intelligence.

The Postal Service is rolling out artificial intelligence tools across 195 of its processing centers to give the agency greater visibility into the terabytes of data it already captures from incoming packages each day. USPS uses the algorithms to categorize packages and to troubleshoot anomalies with packages in its delivery network. AI algorithms can also cut the time to locate missing packages down from several days to a few hours. Todd Schimmel, USPS's manager of letter mail technology, oversaw the agency's partnership with NVIDIA to stand up its Edge Computing Infrastructure Program (ECIP). Each of the four edge servers that are part of the program handles 20 terabytes of package images.

In 2019, the U.S. Postal Service had a need to identify and track items in its torrent of more than 100 million pieces of daily mail. A USPS AI architect had an idea. Ryan Simpson wanted to expand an image analysis system a postal team was developing into something much broader that could tackle this needle-in-a-haystack problem. With edge AI servers strategically located at its processing centers, he believed USPS could analyze the billions of images each center generated. The resulting insights, expressed in a few key data points, could be shared quickly over the network.

The U.S. Postal Service will finally get new high-tech mail delivery trucks. The agency said Tuesday that it awarded a 10-year multi-billion dollar contract to Wisconsin-based Oshkosh Defense to replace it's aging fleet of vehicles. The new fleet will replace and expand the existing more than 230,000 vehicles – among them approximately 190,000 delivery trucks – including many that have been in service for 30 years. The deal calls for the postal service to order between 50,000 to 165,000 new delivery trucks featuring 360-degree cameras, advanced braking, with front- and rear-collision avoidance system that includes visual, audio warning and automatic braking. What car was Tiger Woods driving in accident?:Golf

Congress should pass reform legislation that would establish a Technology Innovation Fund for the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to enable robotic last-mile postal delivery, a new report states. "Of particular promise are sorting and delivery robots, which could sort mail, including into local delivery orders, deliver mail to homes, or both," according to "A New Vision for Postal Reform in the E-commerce Age," a Feb. 11 report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). "One could imagine a postal worker driving to particular routes with a fleet of 10 or so robots, letting each one off to'walk' a particular mail route, and then picking them back up at the end of the route." This funding would help support innovation at USPS, the report states, likening the approach to those at the Defense Department and NASA, which get federal funding for automation and robotics research. Although robotics is not sophisticated or inexpensive enough yet to sort and deliver mail, progress is happening.

Fox News senior judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano weighs in on debate over USPS and mail-in voting. A U.S. judge on Thursday granted a request to temporarily block controversial Postal Service changes that have been accused of slowing mail nationwide, calling them "a politically motivated attack " ahead of the 2020 presidential election. Judge Stanley Bastian in Yakima, Wash., said he was issuing a nationwide preliminary injunction against the USPS sought by 14 states that sued the Trump administration and the Postal Service. The states, all led by Democratic attorneys general, challenged the Postal Service's so-called "leave behind" policy, where trucks have been leaving postal facilities on time regardless of whether there is more mail to load. They also sought to force the Postal Service to treat election mail as first-class mail.

The U.S. Postal Service says that mail is again being delivered at Mar Vista Gardens, a public housing complex with more than 1,800 residents, after an outcry from local leaders over delivery being suspended. "The idea that a decision was made to delay mail in the middle of a pandemic is heinous," said U.S. Rep. Karen Bass (D-Los Angeles), who initiated a formal inquiry into the decision. "How many of those packages were medications? How many were letters from loved ones? Last month, Culver City Post Office Postmaster Roderick Strong suspended delivery to the 43-acre complex in the neighborhood of Del Rey, stating that safety issues were putting mail carriers at risk.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Postmaster General Louis DeJoy refused requests by Democrats on Monday to restore mail-sorting machines or mailboxes removed from service as part of sweeping operational changes at the Postal Service, despite complaints that the changes are causing lasting damage and widespread delays. Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., told DeJoy at a hearing on Capitol Hill that changes imposed by DeJoy this summer have threatened the reliability of mail service in his state and across the country. "What the heck are you doing?" Lynch asked DeJoy at a sometimes contentious House Oversight Committee hearing. Either through "gross incompetence" or "on purpose," DeJoy is "deliberately dismantling this once-proud institution," Lynch said. DeJoy denied any wrongdoing and accused Lynch and other Democrats of spreading misinformation.