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The World's Fastest Delivery Drone Takes Off (technologyreview.com)
A couple of years ago, Zipline, a California-based startup, created a national drone delivery system to ship blood and drugs to remote medical centers in Rwanda. Now it has developed what it claims is the world's swiftest commercial delivery drone, with a top speed of 128 kilometers an hour (a hair shy of 80 miles per hour). From a report: Zipline is hoping its new fixed-wing aerial robot, which is both speedier and easier to maintain than its predecessor, will help it win business in an industry that's attracted plenty of big players. They include Amazon, which has been testing its Prime Air drone delivery service for years in the UK and elsewhere, and Project Wing, part of Alphabet's secretive X lab, which is using its drones to deliver pharmaceuticals and burritos in a pilot project in Australia.
husband: "Honey the farm fresh preserves you ordered just arrived"
wife: "you mean the fruit basket from my mom?"
husband: "now that you mention it, theres a surprising amount of wicker in this marmalade..."
Good people go to bed earlier.
After all those burritos, I can certainly see the need for fast pharmaceuticals.
We don't necessarily want them fast, we want them safe above all. Stop thinking like Intel.
Table-ized A.I.
I have not looked at the article or images.
But in my head I see a standard drone with a ridiculously large rocket attacked to it and a hopeful Wile E. Coyote peeking out of the package getting delivered to the Road Runner's house.
I refuse to look at the article or images because I want to hold onto this.
our 80 mph drone overlords
When Michael, 28, living outside Austin Texas got a nagging headache, he knew exactly what to do. He ordered a fast-drone delivered shipment of Aspirin from Fastflyinmedicines.com. Everything went badly wrong when the 80 MPH drone developed a software problem and hit him in the head.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Didn't Putin just happen to mention he has nuclear tipped hypersonic cruse missiles? Doesn't that qualify as a delivery drone?
Come to think of it, didn't we nearly go to WW3 over some missiles being placed 20 min away from DC when the Russians put them in Cuba in the 60's? Wouldn't that be faster than these?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
You should look at the pictures. Looks like a German V-1 launch system.
Fast is a bit of a misnomer here. They squeaked in just above what multicopters are capable of and called it the fastest ever. There are plenty of faster aircraft already capable of delivery (and better designed for it). The real top speed for a delivery-sized drone is around 200 mph, not 80, it's just that people do system design studies and find that the extra cruise speed isn't worth it (faster doesn't save you any time during the loading/hover/unloading phases) when your range is limited to what batteries can currently provide (50 miles max, 20-30 more practically).
Most of the reason Amazon, Google, etc have such slow or inefficient designs is because they're trying to do all this crap in house and because they have no need for optimizing an aircraft design yet when they're at least a couple years off from getting FAA permission and having fully capable, safe autonomous control software.
Source: UAV design engineer working with multiple people who are currently developing advanced tech delivery UAVs.
I want to see a drone ring my doorbell, hand me my package, and then ask for my signature.
Yet another example of market innovation improving lives and literally saving them in Africa. I'm excited for the future of this technology.
The payload won't make it. Bacteria is unlikely to survive in the interstellar environment long enough to "get there" (where ever there is), much less survive a reentry into a survivable atmosphere.
That might be true for extraterrestrial bacteria, but is rather unlikely. We already know that earth bacteria survive vacuum, space trips, radiation, just fine.
Some of them survive for some time in a vacuum. They do not, however, metabolize in a vacuum: they ensporulate, or in another way go dormant. Result, they do not have any active cell repair mechanism running.
Over the length of time an interstellar journey would take, in the absence of cell repair, accumulated cosmic radiation damage would destroy pretty much any bacteria.
Uh, what did this have to do with the topic again?
I'd like a foot long pastrami with *interrupted by buzzing sound near door* Thanks, that was weirdie-fast.
Far more interesting I'd say are the electric planes being made by SunFlyer in Colorado. Significantly larger payloads and endurance.
Sure, they need a proper airstrip and more electricity to charge, but consider the SunFlyer 4 can move up to 400kg of cargo at up to 225km/h and it sort of puts this thing to shame.
Granted, this thing is more about JIT delivery, but still...
Aren't you glad that the corporate oligarchs paid congress to prevent the FAA from imposing safety standards? Robust software certification standards for aircraft exist (DO-178 series), but doing things safely is much more expensive than doing them fast, and safety isn't important when it interferes with the race to the market.
Did anyone hear the audio jungle sound watermark in the video? It appears someone could not afford $7 for a license...
My bad.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
"which is using its drones to deliver pharmaceuticals and burritos" ...Why specifically these? Is it ONLY those?
There hardly is any "cosmic ray" damage outside of the solar system.
But feel free to make an guesstimation.
(Yes, cosmic rays are something completely different than radiation from the sun ... but they are rare and hardly hit a microbe more than once in their "lifetime")
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
There hardly is any "cosmic ray" damage outside of the solar system.
Sorry, wrong. Check your numbers.
(Yes, cosmic rays are something completely different than radiation from the sun
Exactly. They are not from the sun, and therefore it makes little difference whether you are inside or outside the solar system. To the extent that it does make a difference, though, the sun's magnetic field tends to exclude cosmic rays, and so it's the opposite of what you say: there is more cosmic radiation damage outside the solar system.
... but they are rare and hardly hit a microbe more than once in their "lifetime")
"lifetime" here means: the amount of time it would take a meteoroid to drift from one star to another. If it's a blazingly fast object, it might be as fast as maybe 30 km/sec. You work it out.