Slashdot Mirror
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."
Delivering paper textbooks is probably cheaper than a month subscription to Telstra.
Orders a book for delivery to the US embassy ... just imagine panic!
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
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
"Sheila ... I just shot myself an Enterprise Architecture manual",
"What 'ya want that for Bob?"
"Dunno Sheila but the fun's in the huntin'!"