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Hidden Obstacles For Delivery Drones
An anonymous reader writes: A few days ago we talked over some of the difficulties faced by makers of autonomous car software, like dealing with weather, construction, and parking garages. Today, the NY Times has a similar article about delivery drones, examining the safety and regulatory problems that must be solved in addition to getting the basic technology ready. "[R]researchers at NASA are working on ways to manage that menagerie of low-flying aircraft. At NASA's Moffett Field, about four miles from Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., the agency has been developing a drone traffic management program that would in effect be a separate air traffic control system for things that fly low to the ground — around 400 to 500 feet for most drones. Much like the air traffic control system for conventional aircraft, the program would monitor the skies for weather and traffic. Wind is a particular hazard, because drones weigh so little compared with regular planes." Beyond that, the sheer scale of infrastructure necessary to get drone delivery up and running in cities across the U.S. is staggering. Commercial drones aren't going to have much range, particularly when carrying something heavy. They'll be noisy, and the products they're transporting will still need to be relatively close by. What other issues do Amazon, DHL, Google, and other need to solve?
How will the drones ensure that the recipient is the correct person? And how will they protect themselves against other people or drones stealing the cargo?
The main problem is the overall uneconomical and generally nonsensical idea of using delivery drones. Trucks are simple and work well in bad weather. There's a huge non-employed workforce of people who can easily be trained to deliver packages. Delivery trucks can be powered by natural gas, which is so abundant that many oil rigs simply burn it off rather than going to the trouble of capturing it.
in the general case, delivery drones don't work. Trucks do.
I doubt anyone living in a place like Manhattan would even notice, with all of the noise already present - especially from street traffic.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The problem where people have to be paid to deliver items. Like your postman, or courier drivers. Especially those pesky bicycle couriers in cities.
It's bad enough people can walk past my driveway without compensation! I may not own the footpath but its crossing in front of my driveway!
Those companies operating their pesky satellites orbiting overhead should be compensating me too.
Don't get me started when the moon goes over head!
You never bought the airspace above your house. It's not on the title of your property. Shut the fuck up you useless hick.
Diaper services. The worst time to have a midair malfunction.
You never expect irony, do you?
Want to be a professional wrestler? Visit www.iyfwrestling.com
@iyfwrestling
You want that slice of the universe over your house as well? Then better start policing it, if you can....
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Driverless cars and drone deliveries are good examples of the old saying, "just because you CAN do something doesn't mean you SHOULD."
The drone delivery thing seems like a proxy for the fact that the regular postal system desperately needs a revamp to include more standardization. Basically, we need some system which acknowledges that parcel and package delivery is an increasingly important part of the process, and we want to receive things unattended.
You can only sometimes get this now.
If we had a system where we standardized mailbox sizes to some specification, and then licensed out some NFC/smart card system to let postal workers/delivery companies open them, then we might be getting somewhere. Sure, it's not perfect and it wouldn't be everywhere at once, but if you could simply buy the relevant thing at Home Depot and then delivery companies could be expected to use it, it'd be progress. Then the free-market innovates from there: various multi-tiered security products or the like.
New York City used to have a pneumatic tube system. It's a shame there's nothing similar today.
I put the 't' in electrical engineering.
it's not against the law to fire water out of a hose at an aircraft.
Although, I'd prefer to take a lesson from history and start deploying barrage balloons. The hazard isn't so much the balloon itself, but the tether. Particularly for a small UAV.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I hate to say it, but in general you don't own the airspace above your house...
There are exceptions, and "air rights" do exist.
But rest assured, helicopters fly over houses at 500 feet above the ground all the time and they aren't trespassing.
--- commercial helicopter pilot and certified flight instructor for over 10 years
What other issues do Amazon, DHL, Google, and other need to solve?
People. Bored, often too intelligent for their own good, people.
How long before trolls figure out they can drive their cars close enough and in such a manner that self driving cars execute lane changes to avoid accidents and pull off the freeway? Or until someone realizes they can jam the car's sensors and the poor passenger, with no access to a steering wheel, can't convince the car to pull out of the open parking spot it's convinced it's barricaded in?
How long before an Amazon delivery drone comes in to a house that's observed to regularly get deliveries and gets a blanket tossed over it before being purloined by nerds who just got a sweet free drone to try hacking?
Wind gusts happen. You can factor in for a typical wind gust, a severe wind gust, a once in a century wind gust. You can factor in for different types of hardware failure, for power loss, etc. You can factor in for trees, for tall buildings, for cables... They're finite problem sets.
But bored people? They're infinite.
Weird this got modded 'Interesting'.
Sure, we pay people to have those goods delivered to our door; it's called a service and the people providing it need to feed their families too. That said, if you eliminate those costs by 'automating delivery by way of drones', you'll add the price for buying/training/maintaining these and the whole infrastructure that comes with it; hence, you eliminate known costs by adding new guesstimated (bigger?) costs. TCO is mostly a buzzword in my vocabulary, but in this case it probably is worth having a look at. On top of that you'll probably need to keep a backup 'manual service' at hand anyway because these things won't be able to do their job when it rains/snows/storms/... heck, a bit of wind and you're finished. Nobody cares if the postman wears shorts or a scarf, we 'know' he'll come through.
Also, you may consider bicycle couriers a nuisance, having these things whizz around everywhere sounds (!) much more annoying to me. Might look 'cool' in Sci-Fi movies, it would get on my nerves quite fast in reality I think.
The part I'm I think will be the big show-stopper is the likelihood of people 'catching goodies from the sky'. Given the technical restrictions of these drones it seems fair to assume they'll be used mostly for 'small but expensive' goods. What's to stop people from building a microwave-gun to fry the electronics and run of with the cargo ? Heck, a decent slingshot could probably bring them down. I realize one could rob any courier service, but with drones it's going to be dead-simple unless they start building in all kinds of security measures but thus limiting the capacity/range/... of the machine.
If there is one thing to be learned on slashdot, it has to be sarcasm.
Just gonna leave this here.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon