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Aussie Company Planning To Use Drones For Textbook Delivery
First time accepted submitter Michael Harris writes "According to The Age, an Australian company plans to use autonomous quadropters to deliver text books to University students in Sydney. Apparently the drone will locate you via your smartphone's GPS, fly autonomously to your location, and drop the book into your hands."
Unless you're poor at catching in which case, lawsuit.. and profit.
Delivering paper textbooks is probably cheaper than a month subscription to Telstra.
I'll take the drone, too.
Drone Posties, nice idea (since letterboxes rarely move).
It's a really good idea!
It worked well for Harry Potter.
Orders a book for delivery to the US embassy ... just imagine panic!
drug smuggling
deliveries of court orders
weapons etc
Come on now - who can't see the value in being able to 'catch' one of these drones ? The delivery system is attractive, valuable, and can be parted out easily enough. And you get to call the vendor back and say that you never received the books :-)
I work in commercial Australian aerospace, I do a lot of legal regulatory compliance and I'm a UAV freak. CASA won't give an AOC for this activity as it's inherently non-compliant. The regulations state the UAV should never be in a position that a failure (eg: engine/motor/lift) would cause injury or damage to property and this activity would need to fly over things. In addition to that, I know many of the CASA staff who are involved in AOCs, and they're quite conservative (no offence guys). They're all too worried about the part 61 changes in December which will shake up the whole industry (biggest change in decades) to take a risk on this. I actually spoke with some representatives a month or more ago when they briefed our company on the new regulatory changes and I specifically asked about the future of UAV regulations, they're aware of it's increasing prevalence but nothing will be changing under the new regime.
The text books I remember were all freaking heavy and don't "quadracopters" (six-bladed quadracopters in this case by the looks of it) generally have a very limited payload?
there were a method to codify books as electromagnetic signals, and a transport network to deliver such signals to devices capable of displaying the decodified content. Imagine the added benefit of not having to fly around 1 or 2 kilos of material, with all the energy savings that would imply. nahh, that's impossible
When a car engine fails, the default behavior is to coast to a halt -- unless driving downhill! Even so, a car has emergency brakes, gear/engine braking, a human driver, etc.
This scheme has no human in control (its "autonomous"), an externally provided destination ("connected to GPS on the users' mobile phone."), and no protection from a flying plastic bag or sheet fouling multiple propellors, turning it into a heavy unguided missile dropping onto the street below.
To the founders -- densely populated cities are the wrong place for a drone. How about delivering books or medical supplies in the Australian outback? (with a petrol engined drone)
This seems like a highly inefficient way. Why not just ... email a pdf of the text book?
I'm standing under a tree. Please deliver
Will your books arrive with blood stains after the drone cuts through the crowds on its mission to find you?
... is so cheap already?
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Huge potential for other stuff
A bit ahead of their time tho IMHO.
No mobile phone or plate number to track deep into known high crime areas, just the hoodie copter flying out to your car with gang roundel.
The FSB one for the starving US ex-gov workers who got out with a database retirement package.
In Capitalist West Russian embassy drone is lucrative for you.
Better than been a tourist mistaken for Snowden by the US embassy drone.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
They are apparently competing with the U.S.A.'s NSA for the "what could possibly go wrong?" award.
I hate to say it to Zookal, but we've done this in the small Italian town of Verbania since 2010. There was even an article in the local newspaper, Eco Risveglio. Email me at spiritplumber +gmail if you want a copy of the article. They can also talk to Kite Winters in Melbourne if they want confirmation from a more local source.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
When I first saw my calculus textbook, I thought to myself, "This is going to kill me". Someone will experience death or injury by textbook with this idea.
Because if there is one thing the age of digital communication has brought us, it is the ability to carry paper through the air.
Admittedly this is pretty cool, but so are zeppelins. Doesn't make it useful.
i would get a paintball gun and use those drones for target practice
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
It looks like something you would see in one of those ridiculous pictorials from the early 1900s, envisioning the future.
Signature intentionally left blank.
Are the optics on the drones good enough to evade a kite string (I'll assume they've been tested against electrical wires)? What's going to stop the from flying through localized bad weather?
Make literature not war.
How long will I need to wait until these things start delivering pizza?
Our nanny state won't let this at all. I really doubt it's even legal at the moment, since there have been many laws governing UAV's already.
It's surprising we haven't heard of an asassination done by a small rc plane/copter in the papers yet.
Or we can speak into a smart phone, use an app to convert it to text, send it via SMS, the receiving app will use a synthesizer to read it out aloud. If the receiving phone has stored the profile of your voice, the receiver can actually hear the sender's voice, on a phone, no less! Oh, wait, some already did this. It is called What's App.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Well, I wanted to post a snarky reply like "It's not at all surprising that you haven't heard of one yet." but the US has been using RC planes to "assassinate" targets in the middle east for quite some time. They just do it with small bombs instead of a bullet.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
What is to prevent some enterprising individuals from capturing a number of these, and selling them on eBay? Reminds me of Pokemon, "gotta catch them all".
Each drone would be likely worth hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars, and would be a tempting target for thieves. Even the stripped down electronics are worth it, and one can easily remove any batteries/fuel, or toss them into a metallic mesh box, to shut down or block any tracking signals, before the tracking units are removed in a distant location.
Military and spy drones always operate at great heights, except for takeoffs and landings at secure locations. In comparison, these delivery drones are required to fly quite low, or even land, in insecure areas, when dropping off packages, in order to avoid injuring the recipients and by-standards. At this point could be easily captured by people on the ground the long nets.
The only way to avoid this would be to have people following these delivery drones, at which point it becomes easier and cheaper just to let these people simply hand-deliver these packages without any drones.
I'm surprised RC's arent used more when distributing dope. Perfect for the job.
months, and I live in the US, the world wide capitol of dumb ideas.
1) it requires everyone who orders a book to submit to gps tracking
2) it is for delivering paper books- do people still use those?
3) the inefficiency is mind-boggling.
4) it is rife with safety issues
I could go on but you get the idea...
All books should be pdf's now anyway. This just perpetuates the enormous scam that is the textbook industry. For the prices we are asked to pay, you'd think the books are made of powdered unicorn horn and printed with the blood of wood nymphs. I torrent textbooks for my son and his girlfriend whenever possible. You can call it a 'protest' but it's really my refusal to take part in the scam.
I am waiting for the white ornithopter version. Then I get my notes delivered by an Owl.
What makes you think drug smugglers have not been doing this? Since the paparazzi autopilot came out in 03 (and got refined by 06), it has been perfectly possible to build a DIY drone good enough to move a few tens of kilo's across borders.
Considering the profit motive, and lucrative money for any nerds involved, it would not surprise me if they were one of the first non-military users of the tech.
It's dangerous, it's expensive, it's impractical, it's technically flawed, it isn't "a better way" it just has a smidge of entertainment value which fades immediately.
It's stupid.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Sure they can come up with a way for them to be called Owls :-)
" . . . as God is my witness, i thought textbooks could fly . . . "
Perfect for the job.
LOL!
The drug cartels aren't worried about you moving in on their turf anytime soon.
No sig today...
"Sheila ... I just shot myself an Enterprise Architecture manual",
"What 'ya want that for Bob?"
"Dunno Sheila but the fun's in the huntin'!"
They have done a fantastic job of advertising and setting themselves up for investors with venture capital.
Of course, it will NEVER deliver text books, the CASA will never clear it for flight, there's no need, the cost is ludicrous, the liability is astronomical... But, the technology is there for some other application that we may not yet see and they have set themselves up to profit from this.
In any case, they can go into low risk weed delivery as a fall back plan. 'Yea, officer, I'm delivering text books. That's the ticket.'
for Abo's with boomerangs
This sounds like some 1950s, Popular Mechanics approach to the situation. Wouldn't it make more sense for the books to be digital?
Proverbs 21:19
Pizza delivery
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
cameras on the drone?
the drones telemetry data, so they would know the exact time and location it went down. at the very least would make it easier to search for witnesses.
i expect it would also attempt to phone home when it detects something wrong, in order to make it easier to recover, so you would have to be very careful to block all signals it emits until you pull all the batteries. one mistake and they would know where you are.
for that matter what is to stop people from kidnapping mail carriers and selling their kidneys?
What makes you think drug smugglers have not been doing this?
Weight and size limitations mainly. The payload we are talking about here sounds like something that is suitable for the dealer on the local campus and that is already low risk and more or less needs direct contact since the risk of not getting paid will be significant otherwise.
For transporting across borders we are talking about a business were it is profitable to dig a tunnel with electrical lighting and ventilation and a well maintained road for the trucks.
Unless the drone can carry tons of concealed payload it is simply not competitive with current solutions. (150 tunnels between Mexico and the US has been found so far, there are probably more.)
Yup, that's what I was thinking too, every book purchase includes a free drone.
Australia, droppin' knowledge since 2014
This company is going to be distributing free drones to anyone who cares to grab/knock one out of the air... Sounds like a good business model.
1. Order $80 textbook
2. Buy $20 longrod fishing net
3. Capture $1000+(??) textbook-carrying drone
4. Anime style flashbacks to buying the net
5. More flashbacks
6. Even more flashbacks
7. Filler
8. Lengthy battle with subordinates
9. No clear victor.
And that simpler and cheaper than going with ebook how?
Yeah, that is a great idea, thank you.
...and get a free hair cut in the process.
...Dropbear.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Mt first thought is that you don't have to actually land the drone: you could lower the book on a rope and have it set up that the rope can only support very slightly more than the weight of the book. The person gets the book, pulls down to detach the rope and the drone flies off, having never come within 100 m of you. You'd have some clever hitch on the book so that you wouldn't have 100 m of rope falling on you, unless you tried to grab the rope and pull down the drone, then the rope breaks (at a designed weak point) and the copter flies off to safety. You then get put on a black-list (maybe after a few attempts to rule out accidental snags.) Sure you can probably poke holes in that plan, but like so many things: it's an arms race between people who steal things and people who don't want their things stolen.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
How much weight in cocaine or heroin filled balloons can a drug mule swallow? There you are talking about an expensive airplane ticket and some amount of monetary compensation for a person who can only carry a limited amount of drugs and could roll over on you if they get caught. Not hard to imagine that an inexpensive drone would worthwhile.
Even if the investment is more than paying for a mule, how many times can your drone make the trip before it gets caught? It probably doesn't even have to land at the drop off. A well wrapped brick of drugs can survive a pretty decent fall (and you could always have a small parachute). You could just rig up a targeting system and drop it somewhere deserted and make the pickup when the coast is clear.
Bottles.
This has possibilities for the last 100 meters of delivery - from the (soon self-driving) delivery truck to the customer. The truck stops near the destination, and a quadrotor takes the package to the door. The quadrotor only has to have a few minutes of battery life, since it gets recharged each time it returns to the truck. So it can trade power for endurance and carry more.
Apartment dwellers could have an air-conditioner sized landing pad outside their window for direct delivery.
someones head off.
He was a retired navy officer and his kid had invented this ultrasonic gizmo that killed mosquito larvae. The idea was you'd lower it into a mosquito breeding source, push a button, and a massive ping of ultrasound would burst the buoyancy bladder of the larva and it'd sink to the bottom of the water and drown.
It was very cool tech. He had it set up in a fish tank. He'd put some larvae in the tank, push the button and squeak! They all burst like popcorn. And the device had its applications, particularly in fixed installations like sewage treatment plants. But the big money spinner was going to be catch basins -- the storm drains you have on every street. After a big rain you'd have your inspectors drive around neighborhood, lowering the sci-fi gizmo into the drains and zap all the larvae.
The guy figured that there must be a gazillion storm drains in the country that need treatment. What he didn't figure on was how hard it was to compete with the existing, low tech approach. You put a college kid on a scooter with a messenger bag full of 120 briquettes. Have him ride up and down the street, chucking a briquette into every basin he sees -- he doesn't even have to stop. In the time it takes to zap two or three catch basins with the gizmo, you've got the whole street done and you don't have to come back after the next rain. It's good for the rest of the mosquito season in most places.
The lesson is that cool technology does not a business plan make. They company's still in business, you can google them if you like. Their product does have some useful applications, but it's not the Mosquito Magnet[tm] sized runaway hit they thought it was going to be.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I thought textbooks could fly
drug smuggling
It can also be used as surveillance by those groups of the police. That neighborhood gang can now see the police coming from miles away.
In further news, innovative company plans to deliver the Internet via drone... Books by drone, c'mon - back, to the future!!!!
cameras on the drone?
Baseball cap and hoodie.
the drones telemetry data, so they would know the exact time and location it went down. at the very least would make it easier to search for witnesses.
This would be at the companies expense because the police aren't interested. Good luck getting witnesses to talk to a company man let alone the police.
i expect it would also attempt to phone home when it detects something wrong
Please see "metallic mesh box".
This'll be fantastic, order a book and catch yourself a free drone as a bonus, net gun would probably be most effective
Ditto!! as the Owl at Hogwarts delivering mails :)
Baseball cap and hoodie.
1) you see someone with a baseball cap and hoodie you abort before you get within baseball bat range. if the drone can't recognize this then you just feed the video to a human prior to delivery, and they tell it to go or abort. you are going to need at least some humans to monitor the drones for problems anyway.
2) you avoid those neighborhoods in the future.
Please see "metallic mesh box".
kind of hard to pull the battery when you have to keep it in the box. hope you have a metallic mesh room for that. or a hammer...which mostly defeats the purpose of capturing it.