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Why Bhutan Might Get Drone Delivery Copters Before Seattle Does
From Quartz comes the story of a Silicon Valley start-up trying to kickstart a delivery system using package-laden drones to overfly gridlocked traffic — in Bhutan. Bhutanese roads are slow, the weather can be brutal, and there are very few physicians to go around.
That’s why, earlier this year, the Bhutanese government and the World Health Organization reached out to Matternet, a Palo Alto company backed by some big name American investors that develops transportation networks using unmanned aerial vehicles to reach hard-to-access places. ... The project in Bhutan, however, is the first big test for the startup. Matternet is aiming to build a network of low-cost quadcopters to connect the country’s main hospitals with rural communities. Matternet uses small quadcopters that can carry loads of about four pounds across 20 km at a time, to and from pre-designated landing stations. The company is able to track these flights in real-time, and aims to eventually deploy fully-automated landing stations that replace drone batteries, giving them extended range and flight time. The drones it uses typically cost between $2,000-5,000.
Yeah, only the government should be abled to do illegal things with that.
If there's one thing that works flawlessly in brutal weather, it's aircraft.
Seems like this method of delivery would be great for dealing drugs, or smuggling drugs across international borders. This is exactly why we need to keep very strict regulation on these things - way too much potential for abuse and illegal activity.
For that price and that payload, I'm pretty sure these are already being used. After all, if they're using autonomous submarines, these would be significantly cheaper, simpler, and less of a hit should one be intercepted. Strict regulations are only effective for people operating within the law (not above or below it).
So people you deem as poor are also automatically thieves?
Nice.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
low crime since Steven Seagal is a God. quote: In recent years, he made a widely publicised visit to Bhutan and has been proclaimed the reincarnation of a holy 13th-century Buddhist treasure hunter. link:http://www.bbc.com/travel/feature/20120416-kingdom-in-the-clouds-of-bhutan/2
Yes, because if there is one thing we know about people who break the law to deal illegal drugs, it is that they are huge regulation adherents!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
People steel COPPER in the US, so whatever you do don't install indoor plumbing in your new home!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
The activities you describe are already illegal. It's naughty to kill people too, but adding more laws won't affect people that refuse to follow laws that already exist.
Using the logic you've proposed, we should outlaw computers too. Or even pencils. I've heard tales of pencils being used to write secret notes of illegal activity.
Pull my finger for my public key.
How do you steel copper? I've only ever heard of steeling iron.
Just a thought.
To " Why Bhutan Might Get Drone Delivery Copters Before Seattle Does" is that Seattle has basic infrastructure like roads that aren't impassible after every storm.
Point to point drone corridors can be marked off on maps and given to pilots.
The kind of delivery that people would want in Seattle involves a burrito delivered to their front door.
These are not the same types of delivery patterns or reasons.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
No one said that. But if you for one minute think that poverty doesn't incentivize theft(you know, by means of having greater need), you're a goddamn moron.
Problem, those single rotor systems tend to have more delicate parts than quad-copters.
Some quads have four props directly connected to the motors, others a simple gear box on each motor.
Single rotor systems need to tilt the blades at high speeds, I have a friend who has a couple and the amount of work to maintain them is far more than the simpler quad-rotor designs.
ECP
They are also referring to recharging stations between the hospitals. For example if the range of the drone is 40 miles and the destination is over 40 miles away there needs to be at least one recharge between the source and destination. The beauty of an automated recharge station is that they can be put anywhere along the route.
Our State Constitution has strong privacy protections, and the act of flying a drone that can see in your upstairs window, without a court ordered warrant issued for a specific person at a specific place at a specific time, violates many parts of that.
Anyone at a higher elevation, ie standing on a hill, can see into your upstairs window so standing on a hill would be illegal. By this logic it would also be illegal to fly aircraft as they can also see into upstairs windows. It is not the ability to spy that is illegal it is the act of spying that is illegal.
America should at the forefront of this level of innovation. Instead the FAA sticks its head in the sand while the rest of the world goes forward at an incredible pace.
Yes, because the US is such a poor backwater with no roads or any other method of distributing life-saving drugs to its residents that such a drone system is required just to save lives. Cities like Seattle just don't have an existing distribution system for medicines and don't have pharmacies all around the place. And the US has no existing private and commercial aviation just like Bhutan doesn't, so there can be no issues of mixing human traffic with automated.
I'm sorry that you can't get your Amazon deliveries as fast as you want them. It is a real hardship to have to wait a day or two for UPS or USPS to deliver your new gadgets to your front door.
It is depressing to hear people who have so much complaining because they can't have everything that poor countries have, too.
By the way, the FAA is working on integrating UAS into the national airspace, so your claim that they are "sticking their head in the sand" is false.
I only heard of Steely Dan ...
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Who was lashing out?
You were. "... you wonder why you're so fat ..." is a personal insult based on nothing more than your desire to insult someone else for responding to one of your comments.
I was just making a conclusion based on your statement.
I said nothing about me in my statement. There was no basis for any conclusion. Nor did I say anything about you, so you don't even have the excuse that you felt insulted so you needed to insult in return.
But again, we were originally talking about "needs".
No, you were talking about "wants". Quote: "Why would we want door to door delivery of burritos?" That's the comment I responded to. "We" (plural pronoun referring to people in general) want door to door delivery of burritos because we (plural pronoun referring to people in general) want the convenience. That you could find some way to turn this into a personal insult is, well, fascinating but a complete waste of my time.
During the storm? Like crap. After the storm, when all the roads are washed out? Much better than road dependent vehicle.
There's a difference between desiring critical medical drugs and "consumerism". A bottle of insulin and a car by BWM are worlds apart on the necessity/luxury scale.
Ezekiel 23:20
First, there will probably always be some backup land transport capacity for extreme conditions. This could still allow them to keep average operating costs and response times lower than without the drones at all. Second, I'd actually expect a smaller, fully computer-controlled vehicle to be much more agile, with perhaps the sole exception of having to fly against very strong wind. Areas with periodic occurrences of problematic wind conditions ought to be monitored and mined from the long-term telemetry data, and avoided in automated flight planning. The storage for that is too cheap to meter.
And finally, Denver's airplane was not an ultralight, and it had a standard cruise speed of ~220 km/h and maximum level flight speed at full throttle of ~300 km/h. Must have been some wind!
Ezekiel 23:20
Bhutan is very rugged and I've been driven over roads that were washed out in rainstorms. I don't know how practical quadcopters would be but I would be interested to see how it works out. :-).
When I was there I saw a farm near the top of a small hill with no roads going to it. I asked - how does the farmer get their crop to market? The answer was by animals (donkeys I think). But apparently the farmers in this area had asked for a road and they probably would get one. The main limitation was how to pay for it - they didn't want to take on any foreign debt for infrastructure developments so it might take a few decades. But they wanted their independence and were willing to wait.
It's very true (as earlier commenters mentioned) that the per capita income is low. But when I was there 8 years ago I was struck at how prosperous and healthy people seemed. If I remember correctly Bhutan was largely a barter economy until the 1950s so some of the discrepancy might be that the official statistics don't capture some elements of the economic activity. There certainly were poor areas and the Nepalese road workers seemed far poorer than the Bhutanese - but I suspect that reality is complicated here. Maybe because Bhutan was never colonized we're seeing what a culture looks like that hasn't been plundered by outsiders? I really don't know but I'd recommend anyone who wants to find out more they should just visit there
With the drones - I'd worry about noise pollution and general impracticality with the current state of quadcopters. But it might work well & I hope that their experiment goes well. When we were there my daughter was bitten by an insect and had a bad reaction - we couldn't tell if it was an infection or an allergic response. Thimphu was a day's drive away. Something like this might work & it might be more economical than building roads. I wish them good luck.