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.

Comments

Re:What are they doing to that truck!?!

[RingDev]

The full block from TFA:

An electric truck is already a step up in efficiency and environmental responsibility from traditional internal combustion trucks, with a delivery cost to the shipping company of 30 cents per mile (compared to roughly a dollar per mile with diesel).

they're claiming a 70% cost reduction by going to an electric truck. Same driver, same parcel load, same mileage, ect...

Which would imply that their Diesel fuel + Diesel specific maintenance costs them 70 cents per mile MORE than their electricity and electric specific maintenance.

If they can put that same driver in an electric vehicle and do the same deliveries for 30 cents a mile, I'm thinking that they are doing something really wrong with the Diesel vehicles.

The big wear and tear that they will see over my horse truck is brakes. But even if you figure they drop $1000 on rotors, pads, and labor for brake jobs, every year, they're still putting probably 50k miles a year on those trucks. Which works out to be 2 cents per mile. And that's the hardest hit area.

You could toss in the tranny (although it should be holding up for much more than a single year of stop and go). But even if they're only getting 1 year out of a tranny, and they drop $5k for a new tranny installed each year, that's still only 10 cents a mile.

Suspension, power steering, tires, etc... would all be taking the same abuse whether you're in a Diesel or an electric.

To be spending $0.70/mile on a vehicle putting down 50k+ miles a year, means spending over $35,000 a year on vehicle maintenance.

To put that into scope, a Ford e-350 stripped chassis (your basic commercial delivery frame) MSRPs for $25,000. Jump up to an e-350 cutaway (your standard UHaul truck) for $30,000. Even if they blow $15k on a custom cab/body, you're still looking at a $40,000 vehicle. How the heck are they blowing over $35,000 a year maintaining a $40,000 vehicle?

-Rick

Re:Why don't they use a single rotor?

[Shoten]

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.

Here's an experiment that will illustrate the answer for you.

Buy a Parrot drone, and fly it. See how easy it is? It's very stable, and quite straightforward.

Now, buy a small but decent (i.e., big enough that it could carry something like a GoPro) R/C helicopter. Try and take off; don't forget to wear eye protection. Tally up how many times you have to go back to the shop for new rotors and other parts, as you crash again and again. Or, in the alternative, just watch the Mythbusters episode where they take on the myth of a helicopter crashing because its rotor blades were destabilized with a little bit of tape, so you can watch them go through this exact process.

And yes, it's technically possible to add technology to single-rotor design systems to automate the corrective actions to keep them stable. But by using an octocopter, you can do it a lot more cheaply and more easily.