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Delivery Drones: More Feasible If They Come By Truck
malachiorion writes Amazon's drone delivery service was never going to work. It was too autonomous, and simply too risky to be approved by the FAA in the timeframe that Jeff Bezos specified (as early as this year). And yet, the media is still hung up on Amazon, and much of the coverage of the FAA's newly released drone rules center around Prime Air, a program that was essentially a PR stunt. Meanwhile, a Cincinnati-based company that makes electric delivery trucks has an idea that's been largely ignored, but that's much more feasible. The Horsefly launches from and returns to a delivery truck once it reaches a given neighborhood, with a mix of autonomous flight to destination, driver-specified drop-off locations, and remote-piloted landings. The company will still need to secure exemptions from the FAA, but unlike Amazon, they at least have a chance. There's more detail about Amp's technically impressive (and seemingly damn tough) drone in my story for Popular Science.
If this works out, Amazon will buy the company.
People like magic
More important, they can continue to function even in snowstorms, albeit at a slower pace because the drones won't be usable.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
How is this better than the driver getting out of the truck, walking up to your front door, and putting the parcel down.
Sure he wont get so cold (its nearly up to zero today)
I still don't think drones would cope with bad weather that well (eg the east coast right now)
From TFA:
"A delivery truck costs roughly a dollar per mile with diesel."
I have a 1997 F-250 that pulls a fully loaded 3-horse slant load goose neck trailer and even with amorting out the depreciation over mileage, including tires and maintenance, and obviously Diesel fuel, I'm no where's close to $1/mile.
We don't put nearly as many miles on the truck as a delivery truck, so they are likely seeing higher maintenance costs, but with so many miles their amorted costs are going to be way lower per mile driven.
If they're looking to save costs and they're currently spending $1/mile on their trucks, I think there are some low hanging fruit they could tackle before jumping to drones.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
My FedEx and UPS delivery guys must be early adopters of this futuristic object conveyance methodology.
The deliver truck can be automated, the drones can take off, and there is a guy in the back (give it 25-30s for a robot) loading the packages when small enough, and otherwise delivering them himself when truck stops.
I think Prime Air can work.... but there needs to be a way to turn a quadrocopter into an efficient glider once up in the air to lengthen the distance capable. Also recipient needs a smart phone and gps mark the drop location with a specific app.
IMO, the best immediate use of drones would be food delivery.
Company spends $10,000 on delivery drone. Company dispatches done on it's first delivery run. Rogue actor uses $100 worth of equipment to jam all transmissions to/from the drone, removes power source, and steals it. Company is now out $10,000.
Because they are unmanned, drones are simply far too easy to lose and far too easy to steal. They are impractical.
How about one great big drone that deploys a bunch of smaller drones?
I fly fully autonomous quads.
This is another stupid idea.
It will take longer to get into the neighborhood, setup for launch, launch, deliver, return, and manually recover than it will take your standard fedex/UPS guy to do his job.
Oh, and its going to carry small objects and drop them in the front yard. Not under the car park or the stoop. Most objects will still need carried by a person large enough to carry them for more than 30 seconds and NO ONE is going to want their shit left out in the front yard or otherwise somewhere not leaning up against their home where its safe and dry.
Again, this is another stupid idea. Perhaps people should actually try to implement their projects and compare them to the existing conventional method before starting a 'business' around the idea.
Flying and fighting gravity constantly is expensive, thats why we currently all drive cars and not fly everywhere. Its not because we can't have a flying car, its because it'll cost more fuel just to get that flying car off the ground in the morning than it does for most people to drive to work and back. Flying ANYWHERE takes more time than driving when its less than about 100 miles due to the extra time consumed by taking off and landing SAFELY. Drones don't change that in any way, they just take the human flying out of it. The human flying a problem or a cost when you look at the other expenses. Well, and the human flying doesn't have a death wish, but thats not any different than a broken down drone that flys itself into a mountain.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
So it's more efficient to park a truck at the entrance to a neighborhood, load a package onto a drone, fly that drone to the home, drop the package, fly back, load another package, then fly to the next house, etc etc repeat ad nauseum than it is to just drive the truck to each home and have a human carry a package up the front steps? I don't think so. If anything, the improvement would be self-driving trucks so that the driver could focus on package delivery, loading/unloading, etc.
Because drones. Duh!
I live in an Apartment.
Be seeing you...
A truck? Really?
Bloody amateurs.
So, I propose one big giant drone. It will fly to the locale, and then unleash dozens of smaller drones.
These drones, under the pretense of delivering packages (wink wink), will then scan all residences with FLIR, infrared, and every other technology, including tapping all communications.
The marketing people will take all of that information and do what they need to, and the government will also be provided the information.
Your signature for the package will have a rider on the EULA which says you also authorize the government to tap your phone and your internet connections.
Government will immediately begin any parallel reconstruction tasks needed depending on your political leanings, and the tap on your computers will alerts the copyright assholes if they also need to get involved.
*sigh* Ten years ago, that would sound paranoid ... these days, I'm not sure it's paranoid enough.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Amazon's drone delivery service was never going to work...
Amazon's "drone delivery" was never a serious project, other than for PR to keep Amazon in the headlines.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
How many drones will be lost to dogs?
Relative to the few who will own everything and actually be able to buy stuff. Isn't that the plan?
Its purely a ploy to up stock price, look innovative, and have competitors spend money with RnD on crap that use not useful.
Price per pound is still, ship, rail, then truck.
Unless your delivering something like a paper clip at $10 a piece, there is no profit in this, at this time.
I'm more curious if their "robot lifter distribution centers" are turning a profit yet.
these remotes are not piloting the drones you are looking for..
While I agree with people saying the whole drone thing was just a Bezos PR stunt, out of interest, wouldn't it be better to use a single rotor helicopter rather than an octocopter for these sorts of tasks? I remember reading how a lot of the energy in a multi-rotor is wasted accelerating and braking the motors to control pitch and attitude, and this leads to substantial conversion losses and the need to oversize everything. Surely at eight rotors, the cost of adding a swash plate control would be worth it for the efficiency gains, especially in a commercial setting.
How about automating the package delivery from truck to driver? I see the driver go back a get a package after he stops, that often takes as long longer than bringing it to my doorstep. If the truck pulled up the parcel for the driver as he approached the house, he could save quite a bit of time.
because a truck can carry more than one drone. They usually only carry one human... send out 4 drones in different directions. a single truck drives slowly through the neighborhood stops on the other side, the drones return "home"
... where they smashed nice cars to steal 300 dvd players..
If Drones do make deliveries then I believe Piracy will make a come back. No one will be injured physically and the best way to pirate goods delivered by mobile or flying drone is with another drone. Mark my words.. if drones deliver goods then the Teamsters will fund the best engineers out there to design countermeasures. I for one will be there offering my services. GPS hijacking is easier than you think.
need H1B with truck and CLD pay miniwage + 0.20 mile.
Honestly, once vehicles like the Google automated cars are thoroughly tested, who says they have to cart people around? I see something more like an automated truck pulling up to a block and dispatching a series of small 2-4 wheeled remote vehicles, all of which pull up to houses on the block and drop their package loads through their beds onto porches or other locations, then return to the mother-truck in loading bays so they can recharge, get new map data, and get new packages dropped into them. A wheeled drone could even handle larger packages, and you would only need to send the drones needed for that day's deliveries (Never need to drop a 60 pound box? Don't send the 60+ lb rated drone, send only the 10lb rated drones). Wheeled RC vehicles already use much less battery power than flying ones, and with object recognition cameras I suspect they could figure out where and how to leave packages pretty easily after an initial programming.
There's very little reason we can't automate the entire shipping industry - ground shipping is already all-but-completed, autopilots are perfectly capable of takeoff, landing, and in-transit flight, and delivery to the door is really the final step.
So the cost savings is dubious, as is likely the time saving. What about parcel security? Has anyone solved for the "Jim Bob" issue - you know, the neighbor sitting on his porch with his shotgun just waiting for some target practice? Who is going to trust their 17th century fragile ceramic purchase (or whatever) to a HorseFly buckshot magnet?
The imagined benefit of the drones was that some people who didn't care at all about costs but wanted intimidate gratification (and who lived near an Amazon warehouse) would supposedly pay an outrageous fee to get their little order delivered quickly by drone. Quickly meaning in the next few hours, and definitely today. You can already pay an exorbitant fee for next day delivery if your a rich prick who thinks that they need their Amazon toy tomorrow rather than today. It would be pointless to pay more for drone delivery and then wait for the truck to be loaded tomorrow and drive to your neighborhood (perhaps late in the afternoon by the time it gets to your neighborhood) and then risk the complications of drone delivery just to claim that it was delivered by drone rather than by the smuck in the truck. Similarly, we're a long way from having it be economically practical to drive to a neighborhood and then deploy the drone rather than just have the driver punt the fragile package to the door himself. And we've seen plenty of evidence lately that the UPS and FedEX drivers are quite capable of abusing fragile shipments all by them selves without the help of a drone.
Quite frankly, a "Delivered today by an Uber driver" plan makes a lot more sense and is much more economically feasible than delivering by drone (via truck) tomorrow. And in the long run, delivered by a self driving vehicle makes more sense than delivery by drone. A self driving vehicle could drive up to my house as well or better than the UPS man can do today, and I don't have to worry about providing a drone landing pad or other drone related issues.
This discussion in no way should be taken as an indication that I ever believed Amazon was serious about drone delivery.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
There are subsonic, 6mm BB guns that fire 3x normal mass rounds with CO2 that are a solid lead projectile with neon tracer marks on the back where the barrel has a functional silencer as well. They're about $90-150. You could silently take out a drone and grab its package very, very quickly and easily. That or fishing line net traps that no optics or radar can easily detect. It's like shooting fish in a barrel but easier. This is never going to work.
Packages could be deposited in back yards, possibly on balconies for some apartment dwellers, where they're less likely to be stolen.
Other than that, why not avoid FAA involvement all together by using rolling drones deployed from the delivery truck?
http://www.amazon.jobs/results?teamIds[]=58064
Quite a few job openings for a simple PR stunt.
If this were to be approved, the first time a drone hits a kid in the head and rips out his eye, the company will be sued out of existence.
This is a boon for thieves. They just have to follow the trucks and canvas the immediate neighborhood rather than try to follow them from a distribution center.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
So it's more efficient to park a truck at the entrance to a neighborhood, load a package onto a drone, fly that drone to the home, drop the package, fly back, load another package, then fly to the next house, etc etc repeat ad nauseum than it is to just drive the truck to each home and have a human carry a package up the front steps?
You are thinking waaay too rural. If your city doesn't have a thriving bike messenger industry, it's not big enough for drones.
It's just a coincidence that Amazon's Prime Air story (more accurately infomercial) was shown on "60 Minutes" literally the evening before Cyber Monday in 2014, right? In my opinion that shows just how corrupt both Amazon and CBS's "60 Minutes" really are. News == advertisements. Advertisements == news.
Call back when the drone has triple-string redundant flight controls like in all other fly by wire airplanes. Call back when it is designed to meet the level of safety of manned aircraft. The FAA isn't being irrational; the shills are feeding you a pollyana'ish lie. Drones are more complex than manned aircraft. They have more failure points. They must be more strongly regulated than manned aircraft everywhere except the bullshit Randian dreamworld.
It was too autonomous,
Too SkyNetty is the correct expression.
Have you seen garbage trucks ? The latest just have a driver that does not leave the truck. Same thing
A visiting professor working on the scheduling algorithms for the Horsefly and other semi-autonomous systems gave a talk on the challenges with things of this nature. The bottom line about Horsefly specifically is that, even though it seems like a good solution and the scheduling algorithm might find an optimal solution for delivering small parcels, the Horsefly a) has not yet landed on a moving truck, b) sometimes requires the truck sit and wait for it to return, wasting time and fuel, and c) has a very limited capacity for carrying multiple parcels.
I'll follow his lead and believe it when I see it.