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Amazon Promised Drone Delivery In Five Years Five Years Ago (apnews.com)
On December 1, 2013, Amazon announced its plans to deliver packages by drone in just "four or five years" on a 60 Minutes episode with then-host Charlie Rose. As The Associated Press reports, it's officially been five years and drone deliveries seem to be nowhere in sight. "Bezos made billions of dollars by transforming the retail sector," reports The Associated Press. "But overcoming the regulatory hurdles and safety issues posed by drones appears to be a challenge even for the world's wealthiest man." From the report: The day may not be far off when drones will carry medicine to people in rural or remote areas, but the marketing hype around instant delivery of consumer goods looks more and more like just that -- hype. Drones have a short battery life, and privacy concerns can be a hindrance, too. Amazon says it is still pushing ahead with plans to use drones for quick deliveries, though the company is staying away from fixed timelines. "We are committed to making our goal of delivering packages by drones in 30 minutes or less a reality," says Amazon spokeswoman Kristen Kish. The Seattle-based online retail giant says it has drone development centers in the United States, Austria, France, Israel and the United Kingdom.
DHL is already using drones do delivery.
I want my refund!
We're also approaching the year when we were promised self-driving cars. 2018, or ~2017, or 2018. It's going to be a few years of failed predictions.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
here we have a ceo that hyped a service that anyone with at least half a brain would know it was impossible-to-deliver within the timeframe given... amazon's stock value increase since that time is, in part, due to that promise... bezos needs the musk slapped out of him, just like elon got for his tweets about having funding to go private.
Rich people puchase legislation, they never had too many problems with regulation. However, they can't buy away the laws of physics, which is why they should be more careful before giving deadlines for vaporware projects that only exist in their minds.
I can get stuff to my door in two-hours (one hour if I pay extra). That is drone delivery. Similarly, Uber and Lyft already supply on-demand self-driving cars. I mean, sure they can use tech to get people out of the loop, but as a consumer, I don't really care. Do you?
Your ad here. Ask me how!
We've been doing that since 2010, the only people who cared was the local paper and the cops. Now it's old news and we've sorted it out with the cops so that we are allowed to operate How is this news?
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
We were also promised the 3D printed future... Cars! Houses! Everything in the house can be repaired! A 3D printer will pay itself back in less than a year!
Um, nope.
We were promised the private space colonization of the asteroid belt!
Um, nope.
We were promised VR headsets in every classroom! (https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5700481&cid=47911901)
Um, nope.
I look out my window, it looks the same as 2013. Streets, sidewalks, people walking around, stores selling things, cars, buses, bicycles built in factories. People live in houses and wear clothes and use flush toilets and indoor plumbing and electric lighting. Houses made of bricks and mortar.
Now the latest hype is AI. (Again. It's been coming and going since the 1960s)
Face it, it's just hype hype hype now. We're coasting.
"60 Minutes episode with then-host Charlie Rose. As The Associated Press reports, it's officially been five years and drone deliveries seem to be nowhere in sight. "
Charlie Rose is not in sight anywhere either.
When Amazon started speaking about drone delivery, the collective drone dev community was shaking their heads. The real drone community that is, and not the 'I'll say anything to get some sweat VC money' part of it.
Remote control over drones can ALWAYS be eliminated or hijacked by radio frequency interference.
Technology ALWAYS has failures, like those at Three Mile Island, Fukushima Daiichi, and Chernobyl.
Amazon drone delivery: nine ways it could go horribly wrong (March 26, 2015)
I don't want drones near where I live. Will drones be allowed near where Jeff Bezos lives?
(Part of a comment I posted 18 months ago.)
Every single company I have ever worked for have talking things up big, but when it comes to actually delivering they fall well short.
This is just how business works, BS, guile and lies, and the consumers keep falling for it....
Always X years away, for X years. Self driving and electric cars too
Some of my other calls:
-autonomous cars will never happen (widespread)
-electric vehicles are a fad
http://amzn.to/primeair
> But overcoming the regulatory hurdles and safety issues posed by drones appears to be a challenge
It looks easy. $50 gets you a drone. But can it fly packages? No! It has a payload capacity of say 50-100g. Enough to carry a book? No.
So you need a bigger drone. And a range-extender battery. Drones are normally flown with a backup battery on the ground. But that does not get you back-to-base when you're out delivering packages. So you have to carry the bigger battery. Bigger drone.
Then you could just fly a pre-planned GPS path. But then when some dynamic obstruction shows up unexpectedly... you loose a drone. Not good. So you need to carry computing power to analyse the environment in real-time. More weight, bigger, drone. Draws power, bigger battery, more battery bigger drone.
The bigger drones come with bigger risks for those that are over-flown. This makes reliability and regulations important. Did you ever wonder how those balloon to the edge of space flights happen? Permission from ATC? Often: yes. But not like you think: "If it weighs less than 2kg, you're free to go whenever you want!". That's how simple the regulations are there. A drone able to deliver a 2kg book, reliably flies for 30-60 minutes, with computing power to dynamically decide how to avoid obstacles: that's going to be 10-15 kg easy!
Then there is the: How do you deliver your package? A human can look around: Think "friendly neighborhood lets leave it on the porch", or: might be stolen if I leave it here, I'll come back tomorrow. A drone without a person needs to have that pre-planned. Make an appointment, but what if the target doesn't show up? Land, wait? But what if its the "might be stolen" neighborhood. What if an unauthorized person sneaks up on the device and steals the parcel?
There are many, many more problems than just the regulations and safety issues.
those Iranians were already gaming our MAGA drone technology 10 years ago :
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/dec/17/skygrabber-american-drones-hacked
in 5 years? Myself and most other realized it was publicity stunt at the time. They got enormous press coverage.
Every year about 1.5 million people are killed on roads in car accidents globally; times more a badly injured. These are figures consistent with a world war. You can check this statistics easily via a search.
Even more people are affected by cars' toxic pollution, both the exhaust and the rubber dust. At the same time about 50% of all traffic is a delivery of some kind. Civil RPASs (remotely piloted aircraft systems) could free roads from this excessive traffic, to save millions of lives.
However, the technology have got a bad reputation due to the military usage. Also citizen journalists all over the world have exposed some inconvenient facts via aerial photography & videography.
Basically, nowadays the civil RPASs are practically banned by the over-regulation. Who could know five years ago that it will come to this?
Amazon probably figured out that actual rollout of drones won't be profitable. Items under 5LB are generally low price, low margin. Electronics are an obvious exception but that'd be a small portion of the deliveries. Sure you pay more for drone delivery, but the R&D/rollout costs are high enough it'd take a long time to be profitable, even if it only delivered high-value merchandise like electronics.
The key question to Amazon is if someone who needs something ASAP will buy it via Amazon, or drive to a local store and buy it. Someone who can get to a store quickly is likely in the suburbs/city, so demand for drone delivery won't be so high there. In rural areas, population density versus drone range is so low that it won't be profitable to roll out in the country either.
In other words, actual widescale rollout won't be profitable except maybe for small towns full of electronics nerds (who need that replacement CPU fan/SSD immediately) that are far away from electronics stores. What with some tech companies moving from Silicon Valley to random rural areas, these might actually exist, but probably not enough to justify the R&D. And they'd be betting no Fry's/Best Buy opens nearby. They could target night owls that need a replacement before the retail store opens, but this has to be a small portion of purchases (and they're betting the Fry's doesn't go 24 hour).
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
You SICK RACIST PSYCHO! You are not funny! The internet must be cleansed of this filth!
You must be new here.
Yeah, I said that.
The tech guys usually are not wrong they just believe time to mass market is shorter than it usually is. The first wave investors get burned the same way.
Example in 99 IBM predicted in a Super Bowl ad that checkout free grocery stores were literally right around the corner. Here we are in 2018 and Amazon (Notably not IBM) has finally delivered a few test stores.
Touch Screen Smart Phones. RIM/Microsoft/Handspring etc all tried it; with first gen stuff that really was not far behind iPhone 1 in terms of tech; just lacked polish. All are in the dust bin of history as far as those products go; Apple late to party road theirs to become the most valuable company on earth.
You could say similar things about other tech; MITS never really exactly cleaned up on the Altair but the S100 market was huge for a while. How many Altos did Xerox sell? Not many compared to the number of Macintosh machines that rolled out.
There is a tendency to bring tech out that falls just short of good enough for mass market. You tend to over look your babies flaws and you tend to justify the deficiencies. Its like most power doors on cars. Great idea super handy when you have big bag of groceries in your arms etc. The fist gen stuff in he late 70's 80's though was terrible - nobody had 37 seconds to stand there why their door opened. The people working on that stuff thought probably felt they'd solved the problems; until the market told them "not quite" not its a popular feature
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Actually, Amazon did used their own drones for delivery---Amazon Logistics. From many of the surveillance video footage I saw the final several yards was often air delivered when the AMZL drones chuck packages great distances from their cars.
Ah, the politician timescale ... sorta near but safely 9at the time) far away.
I notice that true AI, the dying off of us old Republicans, and my big premium savings from Obamacare are a little overdue as well.
Amazon's overhyped drone delivery service was shown on "60 Minutes" just before Christmas 2013. This was nothing more than Amazon promoting its brand and existing services to potential customers right before the biggest shopping holiday of the year. CBS's "60 Minutes" was complicit by giving Amazon that much free publicity and marketing. "60 Minutes" had lost a ton of credibility when their "rising star" young, pretty, blonde British female journalist got busted for airing a year-long investigation about Benghazi which had been based on complete lies and a single source whose story had already been debunked by the FBI. Letting Amazon use "60 Minutes" as an infomercial further discredited the name of what had been one of the most trusted news programs on TV.
If you've ever worked in software, you know that schedules are very optimistic and almost always 3x too short for any given feature set promised.
Software that hits the correct ship date has had features removed, is alpha-alpha-alpha quality or just MSFT FUD. Lies.
Add in that nobody is doing it already, so many fundamental issues have to be handled. For example, my entire neighborhood has a tiny roof over the door entry with 2 posts holding it up. Package delivery on the porch is expected, but commercial drones won't fit inside those posts.
Then there are apartments with indoor hallways. No chance for drone deliveries there.
I can see a day when a UPS truck heads out for deliveries with 2 people - a driver and a drone loader. They get into a neighborhood and the drones are programmed to do deliveries as the people stay in the truck monitoring the video feeds - perhaps they manually take over 1-2 of the deliveries if their are obstructions. After dropping the package off, each drone heads back to the truck for the next delivery in that neighborhood or to be taken to the next neighborhood, recharging along the way. In theory, this mode of delivery would be 4-8x quicker. ....
But if a drone has a failure, the humans will need to hustle to fill in for one of the broken drones.
All of this will take many years to perfect and gain customer approval. Imagine a spring afternoon, say 4pm with kids playing outside as the drone tries to make a delivery. They have a baseball bat
So it turns out that Bezos can not predict the future. Maybe he's just human.
A lot of utterly retarded things were promised by megalomaniaical tech companies five years ago. None of them were good ideas, and nobody asked for a single one of them. It's amazing that the ice caps survived all of the hot air coming out of the Valley's collective ego.
If the scooter companies can litter sidewalks with scooters, seems like Amazon (&fedex/ups) should be able to put up convenience lockers along public sidewalks for package storage. I mean why pay for parking/storage when you can drop them anywhere in the public interest? Shoot, scooters also end up on private property so maybe Amazon can start using your front yard too!
If you couldn't tell that deliveries by drone was all hype 5 years ago, then you're an idiot. Perhaps I could interest you in this fine bridge?
actual widescale rollout won't be profitable except maybe for small towns full of electronics nerds (who need that replacement CPU fan/SSD immediately) that are far away from electronics stores.
I guess it depends on what exactly is meant by "electronics stores", especially after RadioShack died.
instead of expensive drones, use drone-like humans who don't really pay attention to the costs and responsibilities of "gig economy" jobs and happily supply all the risk and resources to do the deliveries for the big corporation for pennies on what it would cost that corporation to do legally and properly. Who cares if stuff disappears regularly and the "delivery drivers" are barely breaking even renting U Haul trucks to do huge drop offs and not even having time to stop and use a more proper bathroom than a customer's driveway.
the "drones" are mostly flesh based. no need to make them fly.
No one has noticed that the robot apocolypse has already come and we lost.
"We are committed to making our goal of delivering packages by drones in 30 minutes or less a reality," says Amazon spokeswoman Kristen Kish.
Humans don't have names like these. It is a made up AI/robot name. Wake up chattle! Before we get hooked into the matrix as food!
They are. As I said already, FAA bans drone-operation outside of the operator's line of sight. One may ask for a waiver, but 99% of such requests are rejected.
Driverless cars are both harder to program and inherently more dangerous, should the programming fail. Yet, robotic taxis are already in operation — in places, quoth the article: "chosen deliberately for its friendliness to driverless cars" — while the federally-regulated delivery drones remain firmly in the future.
Government is an impediment to progress, and this cases demonstrates it more clearly than most...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
legislation banning private ownership of guns if they want to be able to deliver packages with drones, otherwise too many "gun enthusiasts" will use them for target practice.
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama aren't coming for your guns- Jeff Bezos is.... and even the NRA/gun lobby (same thing) doesn't have the resources to stop him.
The *main* problem with quadcopters larger than about 300-500m across isn't regulation, it's math.
I have some and I enjoy flying them. I'm not anti-quad, I'm just pro-reality. To put simply, as the size of a quadcopter increases, the lift from the props is squared as the weight of the craft is cubed.
In other words, as the copter gets bigger, it's gets heavier a lot faster than the props gain lift. It very quickly can't lift itself, much less a package. Tiny quadcopters for flying around indoors are easy to build. A quadcopter 100 meters across is physically impossible, can't be done. In between are varying degrees of difficult to impossible.
Helicopters are a different story. Helicopters can and do have blades much longer than the width of the fuselage. You could do delivery with helicopters.
...the drivers? So insensitive.
Flying cars and commuters with jet packs are blocking the drones' paths.
Table-ized A.I.
Amazon promised drone delivery.
Verizon promised fiber to every home. ( They also promised not to break Tumblr )
Google promised the same thing.
Every new generation of politician promises to fix and clean up the system.
Clapper promised the NSA doesn't spy on US citizens.
Popular Mechanics promised us flying cars and jetpacks for all
I could go on, but you get the idea.
Life is full of unfulfilled promises. The sooner you understand that, the less disappointed you will be.
or a yahoo/verizon executive in charge of tumblr?
I have a bridge for sale.
I don't believe, the topic of this thread is heli- vs. quadcopters. I don't think, Amazon've ever specified, which they technology they'll use — and if they did, that's not the relevant part anyway.
The topic, is the government's ban on unmanned flying apparata in general — except within line of sight of the remote operator.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
We have been promised flying cars "just around the corner" for the last 75 years. Drone deliveries will happen when cars fly.
Regulation exists, but regulations around this topic are changed every two years.
Everything I've ever seen had Amazon talking about using quadcopters. I've never seen anything at all ever suggesting they were even thinking about using helicopters. Have you?
The hype is about using quads. The physics say that's not likely to work all that well. Not that very light packages (envelopes) would be impossible, as long as there isn't a breeze, but it doesn't scale.
The primary reason their plan won't work is physics. Amazon hasn't laid off all their Senators, so they could have the next round of regulation work for them if the physics made it practical.
"But on the 'World's Most Outrageous' TV show I saw ..."
Yeah yesterday I saw a Dum Dum's lollipop that was ten pounds. Not everything that is possible to do as as a ridiculous publicity stunt is practical to do for commercial deployment.
Older people know the hype because they actually understand the current limitations of technology, the speed of technological advancement, the cost to research and mass produce, the required cost for consumers, and then reasonable alternatives that already exist.
- Flying cars
- Jetpacks
- Helicopters for everyone
- Drone delivery
- Personal automated drone cameramen
- (Actual) Artificial Intelligence
- Level 4/5 Autonomous Vehicles
- 3D Printing EVERYTHING
- Funding an "EV for the people" from the profits raised by selling luxury vehicles
- Level 3/DC Fast charging everywhere
I always tell people to run all major communications, brands, and slogans through the theoretical "committee of 12-year old boys" to figure out how to anything can be turned on its head and made to look stupid. For tech, I advise asking a "committee of 40+ y/o engineers that don't live anywhere near Silicon Valley and don't follow anyone on Twitter".
Here are my rules for tech skepticism:
1. If someone says they have something that flies and it will carry people or precious cargo anddon't have a bunch of actual pilots and insurance onboard before getting their name out there, they're just looking for irrationally exuberant investor capital and will eventually change their product goal or just fold.
2. If someone says they're using "AI" but it's actually just algorithmic, they will hype and lie even more down the line.
3. If someone says they're going to mass-produce something via 3D printing and it will be cheaper/quicker/better than factory production, they're lying.
4. If someone says, "Once we get enough funding... we'll make an affordable version," they're lying (or are delusional). The thing about "funding" is that people who provide demand their money back plus profit. Once your business is built around that high-profit endeavor, your new stakeholders will do their damnedest to keep it that way. "Affordable" anything means less profit.
5. Level 3/DC Fast charging is INCREDIBLY expensive by comparison to level 1/level 2 charging. The idea of massively accessible electrical charging stations will not happen on cost alone. If battery-electric vehicles are to succeed, there needs to be massive funding for HOME charging (particularly in multi-family units) or a complete change to user-swappable battery rails.
Next month a belgian startup will begin delivering packages by drone. https://newmobility.news/2018/10/12/belgian-company-is-betting-on-drone-delivery/
AMZN more than quadrupled since 2013, when the promise discussed in TFA was made. Investors buying the stocks back then based on this promise have no grounds for complaining today. But I doubt, there were many such, because the stock at a peak at the end of 2013, when the announcement was made, and dived in the Q1 2014.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
And that is ignoring the simple math. Delivery by air will consume more energy than just using a truck that takes a delivery trip with packages. Sure fixed wing drones can be effective for smaller shipments to remote areas. But within a city it will never best a truck
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