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Amazon Gets Approval To Test New Delivery Drones
An anonymous reader writes: Amazon has been vocal in its complaints about how slow the FAA is in approving drones for test flights. In March they were finally given permission to test a drone they had developed six months prior, and they said the drone was already obsolete. Their complaints appear to have worked — yesterday, the FAA gave permission to test a new, updated delivery drone. According to the FAA's letter (PDF), the drone must stay at an altitude of less than 400 feet and at speeds of less than 100 mph.
Spy drones for easy mass surveillance? Why do we need drones that waste fuel trying to stay in the air compared to cheaper ground transportation?
Is the less than 100 mph limit really necessary? And if so, how soon until those speeds are safe enough for the limit to be removed? I mean, if we have the capability to safely use >100mph drones for deliveries of any sort, we should be doing so immediately.
You were critically hit for no damage. The bruise will look nice, and maybe the scars will make good party talk.
Maybe Back to the Future II wasn't that far off.
I wasn't convinced at first but your cited sources proved very formidable against my hunch.
Finders keepers! I bet the parts are worth good money.
Amazon wants automated deliveries with minimal human intervention. The FAA's exemptions still require that the drones be operated by a human, with a pilots license, and only within visual line of site of the pilot.
Looks like Amazon is going to have to keep testing their drones in Canada, where they can test what they actually want to do.
Is the less than 100 mph limit really necessary?
It seems reasonable. There needs to be some kind of weight/height/speed limitations.
Reasonable? I'd say its required. Consider what happens when a drone traveling at only 100 mph with a total mass of 10 lbs fails from 400 feet. Do you want to be under it when it lands? I am pretty sure that is gong to be a strait up fatality if it hits someone.....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Amazon wants to patent a bunch of random "done with a drone" type stuff
Except SCOTUS invalidated those kind of combination patents in KSR v Teleflex. You cannot get a patent for doing an old thing in a new way, unless there is something truly innovative.
Is this freaking for real? First flight should be flying one of these drones, carrying a maximum payload, into a crash test dummy. Second test should be the drone 'accidently' dropping a maximum payload package and having it hit a crash test dummy. Third test should be what happens when the operator receives a text while operating a drone. Fourth test, well I really don't care because 400 ft and 100mph is a non starter for me. Sure, the planes flying above them will be safe but what about the rest of us?
Hey, I'm not against commercial drones. But I was watching a show on Pivot where they were using a $100,000 plus military style drone to try and capture some poachers. The person operating it was an experienced with time spent in Afghanistan flying military drones IIRC. The thing spent a lot more time being repaired after 'unplanned events' than it did in the air. No one was hurt but they were flying in a remote and largely uninhabited region. So yeah, I say let's make Amazon test these things to the max before they are allowed to unleash them into the 'wild'. If not, can anyone tell me the best guage and choke pattern to use?
Why are flying cars stupid? Because energy is not free. All other issues are minor; physics and resources costs come first.
F= ma. So that is ( 100mph horizontal + approximately 100mph vertical fall ) x mass
Packaging is only designed to handle about a 5 ft drop so we are looking at a safety risk.
For safety reasons drones have to SEE that means it will be difficult to prevent alternative uses for the cameras!
Nobody is thinking about the obvious: ROBOT TRUCKS with flying delivery for the last 5-30m from the truck. A flying bees nest of drones begins to make it practical. Robots navigating to doors is incredibly difficult and risky but flying that last 30m makes it a far easier problem. Plus the truck can monitor the whole process (and recharge the drones which will always have limited range since they waste most their energy LIFTING.)
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Quoting the parent comment: "You aren't even a little bit clever and you clearly don't know enough about the state of drones to start making bullshit claims about making it crash."
There is a huge social cost to being disrespectful.
Also, there are SERIOUS issues that make drones insecure. The comment just above this one lists some of them. Others:
1) RFI, Radio Frequency Interference: Someone is outside on the street welding something using an electric welder. Electric welding generates interference on ALL frequencies. The drone receives nothing but noise.
It is not necessary to list some of the places a drone should not land.
2) Drone lands, dog jumps out of the bushes and tackles the drone. Dog thinks someone has thrown an extra large frisbee. Or, dog has been trained to attack all intruders. Drone is damaged beyond repair.
3) It's rare, it happens maybe only once or twice a day, but sometimes there are HUGE gusts of wind. A crash into a tree could result in a drone dropping to the ground and killing someone.
4) Someone shoots at a drone with a BB gun. Drone crashes.
Many more issues have not been considered.
IMO we shouldn't outlaw a technology purely because of what someone could do with it. It's the act of invading someone's privacy that should be outlawed. This accomplishes the same thing while preserving the multitude of legitimate uses for these devices.
Tell that to the NSA, FBI, CIA, etc. (If not in USA, substitute for your own equivalent like GCHQ, GRU, etc.)
[digression]Captcha to post this was "conspire", lol![/digresson]
The problem you create with a drone is that you now have the entire population under your flightpath as a stakeholder, and an involuntary one at that. Once you start to increase the target vulnerabilities you have to dramatically increase the reliability of the vehicle. This means we have to make Amazon delivery drones 100 or 1000 times safer than an Airbus A380 or a Boeing Dreamliner. NEWSFLASH: We can't do that yet. Those planes are the safest things that people can make except for maybe the better examples of nuclear power stations. Kill your lawyers and you might get your drone pizza dreamworld.
Amazon wants to patent a bunch of random "done with a drone" type stuff
Except SCOTUS invalidated those kind of combination patents in KSR v Teleflex. You cannot get a patent for doing an old thing in a new way, unless there is something truly innovative.
Unless it is 'on a computer', or 'on the internet', or 'on a mobile device' or you name is apple.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Amazon wants to patent a bunch of random "done with a drone" type stuff
Except SCOTUS invalidated those kind of combination patents in KSR v Teleflex. You cannot get a patent for doing an old thing in a new way, unless there is something truly innovative.
Except, the patent office is still approving and enforcing those types of patents. Maybe the courts and the guys over there should talk more.
Heck, on slashdot, RIGHT NOW, there is an article about a fight invalidating a patent for a brief sound recording "on the internet" in the form of a podcast having a patent fight.
That court ruling means nothing.
I approve of this. I'm also looking into what kind of firepower I will need to take down a delivery drone.