Only one item can be delivered at a time. It can’t weigh more than 5 pounds. It can’t be too big. It can’t be something breakable, since the drone drops it from 12 feet. The drones can’t fly when it is too hot or too windy or too rainy.
You need to be home to put out the landing target and to make sure that a porch pirate doesn’t make off with your item or that it doesn’t roll into the street (which happened once to Lord and Silverman). But your car can’t be in the driveway. Letting the drone land in the backyard would avoid some of these problems, but not if there are trees.
Amazon has also warned customers that drone delivery is unavailable during periods of high demand for drone delivery.
As someone who frequently orders one can of soup, this is excellent news.
Dropping a can of soup 12ft onto a driveway seems bad for the can and for the driveway.
Self-opening soup can
Just give it a tiny parachute
Operation Gumbo Drop
I’m pretty sure a twelve foot drop onto concrete isn’t good for a can of soup. Maybe it’d work for a T-shirt?
Or a beer… As long as it’s Lite Beer!
As long as you don’t leave your car in the driveway.
People buy clothes off of Amazon?
man killed by falling soup can which he ordered on Amazon
For those of us who order one can of beer, please wish us luck when we go to open it
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Reminds me of an insurance company that wanted to use drones to survey roof damage and in the long run they decided it was overall better to just use a camera on a long ass stick.
Just so you know, companies already use drones for roof surveys. I work for sunrun and we use them to analyze roofs for solar installations and whether roofs need to be fixed before hand.
Aerial drones are a particularly stupid method of delivery. Delivery trucks, combined with terrestrial delivery robots are a much more versatile approach.
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Delivery trucks require a human to drive.
Ok… and? How is that a problem that needs solving?
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Weird, they seem to have done just fine delivering things for centuries now…
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All the time? I’d like to see the statistics on deaths caused by delivery drivers.
And I’m not sure why you think similar things wouldn’t happen with drones.
And they did just fine plowing up fields by hand.
Replacing the hand plow with the horse plow didn’t needlessly cost anyone their job.
Waste of resources. A human can do other things besides drive a van around all day. We spend all this money educating people. So they can do a job a person with a 3rd grade education can do?
Been in automation a long time. Have personally witnessed the primary task of a worker being replaced by a bin.
We should encourage anything that gets rid of mindless tasks and dehumanizes workers
And they should do what instead to put food on the table?
UBI comes to mind.
Maybe we should implement that first and fire all the delivery people second? But as long as Amazon saves money, that’s the important thing.
Find other work? I apologize the rest of the human race doesn’t want to subsidize your lifestyle of thinking as little as possible.
What other work? Do jobs just appear out of the ether for people with delivery experience on their resume?
Ok sure, there’s limitations. So what percentage of their current deliveries are actually possible with drones? If it’s above 0%, then there’s an opportunity.
Beyond that it’s a finance/ risk/ reward/ regulation issue.
Imagine a van which drives into a suburban housing estate and instead of parking individually at different houses for 5-10 mins each, spends less than 5 mins prepping a set of drones which take off from the roof of the van and return in minutes.
It saves time and fuel. It doesn’t work everywhere, but it doesn’t need to.
In fact it could be the same van. Do deliveries exactly as normal, and use a drone for the last half mile when convenient. It’s not either/or.
The big win, I hear, is the massively rural areas;farms and cabins.
The truck can apparently launch two drones at a time, and they save time and fuel – and don’t present a driving hazard for a panel van which now needs to turn around in a potentially winding driveway. Then the truck moves on to the next stopping point when all drones are back.
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So if Amazon thinks they could do it themselves, and cheaper, that seems like a good reason for them to focus on it.
I still think it’s a gimmick, but them paying to outsource something is a reason to bring it in-house.
Yeah, “small and below 5 lbs” describes like 90+% of Amazon deliveries.
I remember people were hyped when they announced on Thanksgiving 2012 that drone delivery service was right around the corner. Brilliant marketing from them because people were hyped.
Turns out the FAA is that corner
I remember people being hyped about netting them or shooting them out of the sky.
I would like to take this time to thank the slow government FAA for preventing Amazon from clogging up the airspace with crappy drones and preventing a stupid system from taking off.
Aside from all the functional downsides, I’d expect these to go the way of Tesla when hitting a larger scale. Lawsuits and traffic incidents.
I feel this could actually work fairly well in smaller rural/suburban communities
Maybe if they used bigger craft with larger payload capacity and longer range
And maybe that craft could have wheels instead of rotors to mitigate the rain/wind problems… i think we might be on to something here!
The problem is that the bigger and heavier the craft the higher it’s minimum drop height is going to be because it’s more dangerous and needs more clearance.
Obviously it also becomes much more costly to run.
Like a Chinook!?
Haha, now I am picturing a huge Chinook delivering the smallest package of essentially bullshit to my door.
Yeah, I am totally behind that idea.
Or one of the ch54 skycranes delivering a shipping container of amazon returns to the auction winners.
not even necessary a bigger capacity I mean it being just able to bring me like a bag of chips or something I forgot for dinner would be great
While people will undoubtedly take the piss, for a number of reasons, it’s less energy expenditure / lower footprint than you getting in your car/truck and going to the store and getting them yourself.
If you factor in all the logistics and systems necessary to run the drone operations and all associated functions, is it likely to be much of a saving?
I could see something like this as useful for medical prescription delivery, but that comes with its own issues and dangers.
Yeah, almost definitely. Even if those systems have a relatively high power draw, they’re still not being powered by a low efficiency ice engine but are being powered by a grid that’s only getting greener. Also factor in the fact that a car+person is minimum about 1100kg that needs to be transported as opposed to the low weight items plus the weight of the drone (can’t be more than 2-3 kg)
Would it be less energy expenditure than a delivery van making multiple stops on its way to deliver you your bag of chips?
That’s where range issues pop up.
And poachers perhaps
Another more successful operation in Rwanda and Ghana is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipline_(drone_delivery_company) delivering 1.8kg over 300km and dropped by parachute.
That works for special use cases in rural environments. They use drones for mail delivery on some German islands, for instance. As a mainstream delivery option in urban environments this is just laughably impractical and that has been very obvious from day one.
It’s certainly more useful in locations with insufficient infrastructure.
Noise is absolutely a concern for flying things. The reasons we don’t yet have flying cars is not because they’re too expensive, but because they’re too loud. And this is specifically why the FAA won’t let me commute to work in an ultralight.
The police want Bladerunner spinners so bad they can taste it. And the reason they can’t have them — or more helicopters — is the noise.
That’s not the only reason why flying cars haven’t arrived. Getting a license to fly is about the price of a new car. Bad weather is no flying. Air Traffic Control can’t handle thousands of commuters. Flying cars are pretty big so parking is going to be even more of an issue.
Also, imagine drunk flyers in bad weather.
Ground traffic collisions can also cause collateral damage, but more often than not those are constrained to the roads or their immediate vicinity where not many people live. An aerial collision may happen above residential areas, and even slight fender benders may mean a double crash (…on little Timmy mowing the lawn).
Also, there’s no air bag in the world that can save you in a crash.
Road traffic is easy to direct and regulate with road signs, lanes, lights, painted lines. Good luck herding cats a hundred (hundreds of) yards above ground. It’s not a huge problem with planes because there are not as many of them and they fly at vastly different altitudes. Not the case with personal flying cars.
With ground traffic, you only need two blinkers (or two sets). Some drivers even struggle with using that two properly. Good luck for getting them to use more.
And that’s just the top of my head, I’m sure there are like 2634 other reasons.
They’re working on next generation air traffic control, that is automated and also can handle drones whizzing around next to flying cars, but developing that isn’t fast or cheap or deploy and will need extra equipment on the ground and in the cockpit.
…and that’s still just for the drones.
The amount of energy required to keep something in the air instead of using the ground is also astronomically bigger
The average person can barely drive without murdering someone. Flying is even more complex than that, the noise is just a small problem compqred to that.
We have flying cars, they are called airplanes or more specifically civil utility aircraft. You know, like the Cessna 172.
Flying vehicles aren’t more mainstream because of the cost. A new plane can cost over half a million dollars while a used plane can easily be over a hundred thousand dollars. And that’s just the cost of the plane.
The other reason is because the rules are more strict and are actually enforced. If a pilot flew their plane like the average person drives their car they would be sitting in jail await trail for attempt murder.
Great, it drops the package from 2 meters.
That’s an improvement over the delivery drivers that yeet my package over my fence
12 feet is more like 3.5-4
Just like plopping a grenade in a foxhole …
Welcome to the future
It’s obvious that autonomous drones are more difficult to create than they seem… I think delivery robots that go on the ground are much safer and more feasible. They can carry heavier packages, they are less dangerous and can travel at less dangerous speeds.
… and they can get robbed or kicked, their sensors sprayed shut… and repair costs a fortune. I don’t think delivery without a human makes much sense, maybe except for a drone that delivers to the Australian outback or a small island at the German coast.
They want desperately to cut delivery cost by taking out the human they have to pay for it to do the work. To do so they spent billions they could have used to pay these people a decent wage and hire more of them. It is dumb.
Don’t those same issues apply to humans though? You can beat up or kill a human delivery driver and take everything in the truck just as easily as you could with a hypothetical robot.
This is very true, but every porch pirate isn’t a moral free tweaker willing to do whatever it takes to score. I think the average down on their luck schmuck would have fewer qualms vandalizing an automated delivery system.
I am from Germany, our crime rate is very, very low. I doubt that many people here would think beating up or even killing a person is “as easy” as doing it to a funny looking delivery robot. Depending where you are from, that might be different though. If you live in a place where people actually see no difference between both and do one as easily as the other, then please stay safe!
Solution: every 17th drone is a decoy carrying a paint bomb to mark anyone who robs it or were just standing around not trying to defend it or defending it effectively enough. Then the Amazon corporate police can swoop in and deal with anyone with paint on them.
There are ways to prevent that, like alarms, notifying the police. These robots will absolutely have ways to be tracked at all times, cameras and all. You could also only use them for low value packages, so the effort is less worth it.
And use less energy since they don’t have to fight gravity
Because there arent enough people to fill delivery jobs? Or is it that they’d want living wages and health insurance?
Do you seriously think we shouldn’t try to automate things as much as possible? Why keep jobs that no one really wants to do?
Because the reason no one wants to do those jobs is because they don’t pay anything and they don’t have any good benefits.
I would bet people don’t want to do those jobs because they’re not really fulfilling or enjoyable to most.
I’m just sitting here thinking personal home delivery maybe isn’t the most sustainable thing in the world.
Perhaps we could invest the massive amounts of money that it takes to deliver goods to homes into better transit and post offices that don’t look like crap.
We’ve had mail delivery for what, 200 years? We used to have (and some places still do) have milk and vegetable deliveries. It’s not even that expensive.
I had diaper pickup and laundry service a few years ago, which was amazing. Well worth the $.
If I’m honest it really is not at all surprising.
Hyperloop 2.0.
Delivering something by air is the least efficient way to do so, unless it’s Avdiivka and you deliver a grenade. Yeah, making them now is cheap (and we overproduce these unrecycleable toys), but what the upsides of using them instead of, like, land drones, or human workers, or some rail-system? It’s cool and fancy the first time you order it, but what’s the reason behind it other than our entertainment? Why not to make a delivery guy shoot fireworks once they are here - as enjoyable, and as chinese as these drones.
Why we want to produce this junk in the first place? And aren’t we afraid this shit records close-ups of each property itflies over?
There are places delivery with drones makes a lot of sense and is the best way to do it. It depends what the most important metric is.
In an African country they are delivering medicin and bloodbaths with a drone plane to hospitals that need them for emergencys. That way they only need to have one central stock of these supply’s that can be quickly dispatched. Driving wouldn’t be an option that would take several hours over bad roads. Veritasium did a video about it.
For Amazon deliveries it makes no sense at all.
I agree with you.
I’ve mentioned ukrainian Avdiivka, a battlefield, that isn’t accesible by usual means (and where aerial drones can launch a surprise attack).
The same goes to places with destructed or underdeveloped infrastructure.
Drones can be used in the least accesible places. But they ate tested in places that are already covered by drivers.
I disagree with you with the efficiency comment. In an ideal scenario, deliver by air can be super efficient. No road obstacles, shortest path trajectories, hell, the sky is 3D!
It’s been tried before: messenger pigeons.
It can be efficient, but the major pro-land point is: what would it do having 0 fuel?
A car would stop, a drone would drop.
It’s an exception and no one would pilot a drone to it’s exhaustion, but either way holding it in the air is a costy investment.
How do robo-taxis or electric bikes for rent deal with the fuel problem? It’s an already solved issue.
However, you do have a point with malfunctions.
Those don’t tend to fall out of the sky when they run out of power.
Understood, but then robotaxis have run over people without the need of flying.
E-bikes and e-scooters are better, but I haven’t personally seen an infrastructure to use them unless they are personally owned and recharged at home. Are there stations for them in the US?
Robo-taxis though are their own can of worms. Discussion about their capabilities can take days.
I’m not sure how it works in the U.S., but in Europe there are stations in which users are encouraged to go to and grab a recharged battery (for a discount.) I’m guessing they have employees who do this as well…
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So do gas stations. I wouldn’t say the gas refueling problem isn’t solved because of that.
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The first thing you mentioned has nothing to do with fuel, which was OP’s original argument.
As for the second thing, I’ve already said I agreed with OP.
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I’m okay with being wrong. Check my comment history if you’d like in which I happily admit I’m being corrected.
But you didn’t say “depleted” or “out of fuel.” You said “broken.” And that’s different.
Can you admit that you misspoke, then?
I’m curious why the limit is one item. If the drone can carry 5 pounds, why can’t they put 5 pounds of stuff in the box?
Maybe is the delivery part, like you can make it easy to make one drop, but to select one from the individual packages to drop while leaving the other are not as easy.
