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

It's because flying is magic

[Anonymous Coward]

People like magic

What are they doing to that truck!?!

[RingDev]

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

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:What are they doing to that truck!?!

[ShanghaiBill]

It's not just the number of miles, but also the stop-go-stop-go-stop-go nature of deliveries that kill fuel consumption and increase wear and tear too.

... and far more than any of that, are the wages paid to the driver. If the truck averages 30 mph, and the driver makes $30/hour wages+taxes+benefits, then that is $1 per mile.

Waste of time

[BitZtream]

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.

This is more efficient, reduces cost how exactly?

[Jahoda]

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.

Re:Whoa

[SJHillman]

Your FedxEx and UPS guys are already using drones with truck-based mobile launchpads?

Shit, my FedEx guy is still trying to figure out the "This Side Up" arrow on package.

I live in an Apartment.

[Nyder]

I live in an Apartment.

Here are the FACTS

[Frosty Piss]

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.

Re:Here are the FACTS

[ShanghaiBill]

lots of naysayers

Always remember that Slashdot has lots and lots of cynical naysayers, they are disproportionately modded up, and they are nearly always wrong about anything that has a "social" aspect. Here are some consensus predictions from Slashdot:

1. Smart phones are stupid, and will never catch on. They are a solution looking for a problem.
2. Tablets are even stupider, and will definitely fail, because you can't write code on a tablet.
3. Facebook will be out of business by 2008.
4. Nobody will use "the cloud" because any home user can build their own triple-redundant RAID storage system, and battery backed whole-house conditioned power.

Re:Here are the FACTS

[rogoshen1]

Also Slashdot has some crazy smart people posting, but that intellect is very domain specific and tinted by an insanely high level of naive, unrealistic libertarianism.

Correct for that, and you're golden.

RE this is more efficient...

[Mr D from 63]

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.

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.