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Quadcopter Drone Network Will Transport Supplies For Disaster Relief
kkleiner writes "A startup called Matternet is building a network of quadcopter drones to deliver vital goods to remote areas and emergency supplies to disaster-stricken areas. The installation of solar-powered fueling station and an operating system to allow for communications with local aviation authorities will allow the network to be available around the clock and in the farthest reaches of the world. 'Matternet’s drone network has three key components. First, the drones—custom-built autonomous electric quadcopters with GPS and sensors, capable of carrying a few kilos up to 10 kilometers (and more as the tech advances). Next, the firm will set up a network of solar-powered charging stations where drones autonomously drop off dead batteries and pick up charged ones. A drone battery that can travel 10 km need not limit the drone itself to 10 km — rather, these drones can theoretically travel the whole network by swapping out batteries. The final component will be an operating system to orchestrate the drone web, share information with aviation authorities, and fly missions 24/7/365.'"
Well now, the Thunderbirds are truly obsolete!
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In the sort of remote disaster prone areas that this would be useful, the batteries and any copper will be ratted by the locals, and everywhere else, the stations will be used as target practice.
We've reached the singularity now haven't we? I mean it's very singular how that company and that shill website happen to publish this sort of article at the same time when the kind of disaster they're talking about is in the news. It's times like these you're reminded that singularity hub isn't just faffing for the dimwitted, it's has a soul, too. A soul of darkness, granted, but a soul nonetheless.
So a startup is trying to cash in on recent disasters with stuff that sounds great in the news feeds but they have no chance of actually deploying? Ok.
Supplies...including tacos?
Monstar L
Sounds good for eathquakes, but how well do they fly in a hurricane or severe thunderstorm
Off-the-shelf parts, perhaps. Lots of hobbyist quadcopter drones available now, but I've never seen a tiltroter drone.
Much more likely to be used for city-wide surveillance than for world-wide disaster relief.
Why do you need a licence? Wouldn't it be a motor on a servo? Little bit different to Boeing designs.
I see stability for a small tilt rotor plane while vertically ascending a bit tricky.
Why not one that can launch just by throwing it or off the top of a car? They already exist.
It fascinates me that they think they could make a profit with something like this.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
My impression was that copters are difficult to fly in high winds/storm conditions. Is this true? will this also be true of these copters? If so, the claim that they can fly 24/7/365 is perhaps not credible?
What is their average speed and reliability compared to a local with a donkey (classic and well proven difficult terrain portering option)?
What is needed for quadrcopters is a small quiet petrol/gas engine. An electric battery has got too little energy. Usually it is just 10 - 30 minutes.
That is 1 unit in, 1 (or a bit less) unit out with 2 units are deposited to allow the next drone to hop to/from the next station. So for N hops, one will consume in 2^N units of fuel per drone simply for the last trip of 2*N (ie. return).
Now if they create deposits by sneaker-netting them to the depot, the problem will be solved.
You forget the power of magic Matternet will be using: the indestructible (unaffected by disasters) network of solar-powered charging stations that can be used even nighttime (as in 24/7/365) and in the farthest reaches of the world.
What? Not magic but smoke-and-mirrors? Well, sonny, nothing that's not solvable by the correct amount of "lobby".
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
For package delivery you would likely be flying in urban areas that have restrictions on unmanned aircraft, autonomous or not. I believe in the US you need at least one operator/spotter with line-of-sight (with their own eyes, not a camera) to the aircraft - not easy in urban areas unless you are in a helicopter yourself.
Nevertheless, I am sure this will happen in a few years, but it will be messy.
That doesn't mean quadrotors are in any way good for a commercial product. Quadrotors mean you don't need the complex gearboxes and swashplates of a traditional helicopter. You just get four cheap propellers and cheap electric motors, a speed controller, and strap them onto a bunch of sticks. The barrier for entry is very low, meaning hobbyists can get into it with little skill or ability. If you actually have trained engineers to design it, and trained machinists to built the intricate workings of a traditional helicopter, there is no value in a quadrotor. I can't help but summarily write off any company trying to bring such a product to market, since whoever holds the reigns has no background in basic physics.
Why would stability be any more difficult than a traditional helicopter? It's not like the center of gravity needs to be perfectly aligned with the center of the rotors. We have this thing called a swashplate. The rotor blades are hinged, and the free end rides on the swashplate. Move the plate up, your angle of attack decreases, and you have less thrust. Move it down, and you have more thrust. Pitch it, and you generate uneven thrust across the rotor disc. You can use this to shift that center of thrust across a wide area, compensating for a significant variation in CG. It does of course mean you have to build proper helicopter mechanisms, rather than a crappy variable-speed quadrotor.
Could anyone see any future for this sort of set up in cities for local parcel delivery?
No, because any first year physics student who actually understands the implication of calculus and Newtonian mechanics could tell you that you don't use quadrotors for payload or endurance.
1) The idea of using quadcopters smacks of following a fad to get views and sound trendy. The reality is that quadcopters are horribly inefficient and unreliable.
The idea smacks of someone who is already trying to drum up venture capital and hasn't yet talked to an engineer, or even a skilled hobbyist. It makes the concept sound very disingenuous.
Hey, my Faberge eggs just arrived via drone....crap.
Forget, for a minute that drones have started off with a bad reputation, thanks to things like anonymous delivery of lethal capabilities and peering at people's backyard pot farms.
There are a LOT of intriguing applications for small quadcopters in a disaster situation. Since they are smaller, lighter, and slower that the bomb-type drones they can go places faster and easier than land-based alternatives and they can travel closer to the surface without the limitations of actually having to navigate the surface. Look at Oklahoma. In less than an hour a normal community became an unrecognizable obstacle course of twisted metal and debris with people intermingled with the rubble. Streets became impassible, and the extent of the damage and the urgency of the situation mandates that you cannot just bull your way in, you need to know what to address first in order to get a maximally-effective response.
A fleet of slow, low-flying quadrotors can map out this sort of debris field much more effectively than faster, high-flying craft, to say nothing of ground reconnaissance. It can help spot many of the victims, and not only direct aid to them, but deliver lightweight payloads such as cellphones and comfort supplies. It can make it easier to single out possible sites where victims might be trapped - even communicate directly with them.
Drones are a two-edged sword. But so are printing presses, and printing presses have almost certainly killed more people than drones. Don't throw out the good with the bad.
Hinged blades? swashplates? tilting rotors? That's a lot of mechanical systems to maintain. An electric quadcopter is simply four electric motors with propellers attached to their shafts. Nothing tilts or pivots or hinges. No moving parts apart from the propellers.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
No one would ever use an Arduino for anything in large scale production. An Arduino costs $35 last I checked, but its constituent components amount to around $5 when bought individually.
Ah, but you could deploy a squadron of these drones and cover a huge search grid, thus finding the victim sooner, allowing the Search and Rescue folks to concentrate more on the rescue portion than the search portion.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
That's also four electric motors and four speed controllers that must all be in proper functioning order or else the thing crashes.
Electric drones will require very minimal maintenance. Electric motors and batteries don't really need servicing, they don't require all the same fluids, they can last longer, they are less complex, and they can refuel in remote locations for free.
A gas/diesel motor would need very frequent and regular servicing and a large maintenance team.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
orders of magnitude faster than a local and a donkey.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
And very useless. The only thing crappier than the payload of a quadcopter is its range while carrying a full payload.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Sadly, this is yet another example of a cool concept that isn't going to get very far (no pun intended) due to the lack of the über power supply. At best, multirotor helicopters with any sort of payload have an endurance of about 15 minutes. Until that number gets well above the 60 minute threshold, this is all drawing-board stuff. And I'm talking about 60 minutes of on-mission performance which doesn't include getting to and from base camp. You're really going to need some sort of ultra-capacitor or fuel cell.
They exist. If I recall correctly, Model Airplane News even published plans for a fairly hefty gas-powered one (might have been another magazine).
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
A network of stations where fresh mounts/batteries can be picked up for a courier going over rugged and perhaps dangerous terrain.
So... this would be the Droney Express?
Those quadcopter things are fairly reliable. There's even designs out there for 6 or 8 redundant rotors. These things can survive a fairly hard landing especially if the rotors are shrouded, whereas a helicopter is a lot more damage-prone. A running helicopter that falls on its side will most likely need some serious repair work before it'll fly again. A damaged quadcopter can be fixed with duct tape in most cases.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I'll take the reliability of four electric motors over a swash plate any day of the week, and twice on Saturdays.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
No you won't. Lift must be balanced. If you lose one motor, you also lose its opposite. If you're using these things to haul cargo, which means you're not running it anywhere near a 2:1 thrust to weight ratio, and you're going to crash. You're right back to the single point of failure you were with the swashplate.
Odd you should say that the largest lighter-than-air craft could carry only 10 tons.
A simple google search reveals that the Hindenburg apparently had a lift capacity of 10,000kg, which is indeed 10 (metric) tons, or approximately 10 "long tons". Something closer to 11 "short tons", though.
I was thinking the CycloCrane would have a larger lift, but apparently that was limited to 2 tons (theory; 1 ton in practice, it turned out).
If you haven't figured out a method to safely return an egg from a rocket trip, I've got a 4th grade science project to sell you.
"Why do you consent to live in ignorance and fear?" - Bad Religion
We better make sure the chief scientist at "Matternet" is not named Miles Dyson...
Here's a peanut, time to recharge Here's a slice of apple, time to recharge.
The joke is that it should actually be a recovery of a drowning victim, not a rescue. If you still have a chance of rescuing them, they haven't yet drowned.
Yes, I got the joke. However, there is a difference between drowning and drowned. Drowning means having your respiration impaired by liquids. It does not mean death. Many drowning victims have been plucked from the water, had their lungs drained and are alive today.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
It won't help rescue the drowning victim because the actual people who could rescue aren't going to be any closer to the victim than currently and a 20 minute response time will REMAIN a 20 minute response time for that reason.
Sure, I used the wrong word. I should have said "soon-to-drown" victim, not "drowning" victim. Also in theory, the quadrocopter itself could carry a rescue buoy and/or it could also be paired up with a water rescue bot like Emily.
This presumes
a) that the drone is taken out there (if it's on a charging station), but if they knew that then they could also send humans out there at that time instead
A bot could be sitting in a launching station ready to deploy at a moment's notice 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a year. I don't think you could say the same thing for a human being. In any case, I'm not saying that a bot would be ideal for all use cases. That's certainly not the case.
I seem to remember using one of these during a GTA mission.
-- Jimtown Kelly
One thing I've been thinking about.. Everyone here assumes that the charging stations need to be placed out before the network of quads can start doing it's thing.
But, if you had some special mapping drones, lighter and longer reach, with terrain mapping fly out first, then make the charging stations modular..
The network could create a map of the area and build itself until it reached the target. And increasing network capacity would consist of adding more chargers and quads at the entry point,and the network could scale itself up. And when done, it can pack itself back together.
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."