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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.
Drone Posties, nice idea (since letterboxes rarely move).
Look, they could launch my deliveries at my home with a medieval trebuchet and still manage to deliver them with less damage than the current postie.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Orders a book for delivery to the US embassy ... just imagine panic!
drug smuggling
deliveries of court orders
weapons etc
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)
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.
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
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.
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...
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."
Because clearly it is the letterboxes fault that the postman tried to fit a 20 inch package into a 10 inch box...
" . . . as God is my witness, i thought textbooks could fly . . . "
"Sheila ... I just shot myself an Enterprise Architecture manual",
"What 'ya want that for Bob?"
"Dunno Sheila but the fun's in the huntin'!"