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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.
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.
From the urban commuters point of view while looking at a delivery truck:
Why do we need trucks that waste time and fuel idling in congested traffic compared to faster and more efficient drones?
Different locations have different challenges that need different solutions.
Because ground transportation in gridlocked cities takes forever.
No sir I dont like it.
I wasn't convinced at first but your cited sources proved very formidable against my hunch.
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.
I don't have any problem with them being used for security surveillance on private property. If I own a large area that is prone to break ins and theft I should be allowed to patrol it with drones automatically.
I should be able to order a pizza and have it delivered by drone 5min after it's out of the oven. Or to get a package across town before the close of business.
I do have a problem with the police using them in a similar manner as constant eyes in the sky everywhere though. Or if privately owned drones were trespassing on private land trying to peek through windows.
Ground transportation is slow and dangerous. why clog up the roads with more cars?
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.
I was at a park at an event last week. There was a guy with a camera drone buzzing overhead. It was quite irritating and I was reminded of my former prowess at clay pigeon shooting. The drone wasn't moving nearly as fast.
I don't know that people will be accepting of things buzzing over their heads all the time. Expect local ordinances.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
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?
I resisted in the same way I resist hitting stupid people in the face, in order to avoid prosecution.
You seem to have missed my assertion that the result of the irritation factor will be local ordinances, rather than a new form of skeet.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
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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I was at a park at an event last week. There was a guy with a camera drone buzzing overhead ... I don't know that people will be accepting
I was at a park at an event last week. There was a guy with a couple of screaming kids on one side, and some idiot playing some loud music from his parked car, and someone else with three terriers on leashes, barking non-stop.
I don't think people will be accepting of these loud, distracting things.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I won't shoot down your drone, I'll just make it so you lose control of it and it crashes.
I'd love to see you try to prove that I caused the problem too.
No you won't. Any decent "drone". Will just land or return to base if primary or secondary radio links are lost. If GPS lock is also lost, it will just land where it's at.
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. Even the basic OSS flight controllers are well beyond your abilities based on how easy you seem to think it is.
Just because you saw something on the Internet about Syria or Iran redirecting US MIlitary drones doesn't mean that's what actually happened.
All of my fully autonomous drones are not going to come down due to RFI, since RFI is so common place that they are designed to deal with it naturally, even without the threat of haxors. My radio links are digitally signed packet networks, you aren't pretending to be my radio transmitter though not encrypted so you could watch the data flow, it's pretty useless to you. If you confuse it with bad packets, it will just ignore you and stay on its preprogrammed flight plan or potential it's "radio signal lost" plan, which personall I just set to RTB.
No gps lock has the option to hold position and wait or just land immediately.
Really, we thought of people as clever as you probably well before you were born.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Drone lands in middle of street, gets crushed by cars.
Drone lands in a lake, river or the ocean, gets lost/destroyed.
Drone lands in the middle of a park, gets crushed by my size twelve, steel reinforced, construction boots. "Oops, didn't see that there. You really ought to be more careful where you place your belongings".
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.
Expect local ordinances.
I don't think that the drone delivery question will be settled by the FAA, aviation experts or any laws. It will be settled in the courts, by lawyers. When a drone crashes in a park, and turns the face of somebody's child into raw hamburger meat, there will be a massive liability lawsuit.
Game over.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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.
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. Even the basic OSS flight controllers are well beyond your abilities based on how easy you seem to think it is.
Just because you saw something on the Internet about Syria or Iran redirecting US MIlitary drones doesn't mean that's what actually happened.
I saw something on the Internet about Etten-Leur. That one quite clearly crashed, setting the payload (first asparagus of the year far a fancy restaurant) on fire.
You'll likely face, at the most, a civil citation for discharging a firearm within city limits...
>1) A quad copter flying 30-60 feet overhead.
But 10 feet was annoying.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Actually it would felony Malicious Destruction of Property.
Good-bye