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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.
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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
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.
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