I feel like this is a stunt. Drone delivery only works with customers that have private backyards - so won't work in a city, since the payload is unsecured after the drones drop it off. In a suburban/rural context, density is lower, meaning that with the limited range of drones, distribution centers won't be able to take advantage of density. Thus the range of products available at each distribution center will be much lower (it's much more efficient from an inventory/logistics standpoint to have one distribution center in midtown Manhattan with many products, rather than many distribution centers spread across the suburbs of NYC, say), forcing customers to choose from a given list of a few hundred products. Drone delivery is thus high convenience, ultra-high speed, low volume, high cost -- but more importantly, a low-choice process. What kind of things will you buy from a list that you need delivered within 30 minutes?
I live in an urban area in the US. UPS, FedEx, and the USPS all drop my packages off unsecured at my front door as it is. What difference does it make whether it's a person in a truck or a drone doing it?
As an Amazon Prime member, I sometimes use Prime Now to get deliveries made in two hours from a limited selection of products, and that requires a minimum order and a delivery surcharge. It's still a great option that I take advantage of. I have to imagine I would also take advantage of an even faster drone delivery option for some things: snacks when I haven't gone shopping and have people coming over (and I can't be bothered to go out to do proper shopping beforehand), the odd household item I need but don't feel like driving to pick up, etc.
The "not driving" part is the key for me personally. I don't really like risking life and limb to buy potato chips.
USP, FedEx and the USPS all leave your packages in unsecured areas. These drones would have to literally drop your packages off in a city. Those are very different actions.
The logistics of even getting close enough to the ground to not obliterate your package, in an open enough area, while avoiding people and other obstacles (both stationary and moving) is a nonstarter for even small cities imo. Good luck in NYC.
You're overstating the dropping thing. I've had shipments with plenty of rough deliveries and rougher trips in the truck on the way to be delivered. Being carried in the air and lightly dropped from 10 or 20 feet off the ground isn't going to hurt my Blu-Ray copy of Captain America: Civil War.
I think when you guys say "cities," you're talking about some kind of nonexistent arcology of mile-high cyberpunk buildings where each tenant lives in 50 square feet. I live in a city, mere minutes from downtown, in a town home that is neither big nor fancy nor isolated. There is ample space to fly right up to my door step without ever coming close to any person or vehicle that could conceivably be close to my front door unless someone were standing in front of my front door, and even then, I'd probably lay out my special RFID-enabled chartreuse drone delivery area designation mat on my back deck instead or whatever. It's not a hard problem. All the hard parts have been solved. It's mostly legal now.
Yea, a blu-ray movie isn't hurt by a 20 foot drop. A blu-ray player is. Most packages are not made for shocks, just constant pressure (think the difference between someone punching you and someone sitting on you).
Also, I'd bet that what you consider a safe range for drone operation and what a federal aviation safety official (or non-US equivalent) considers safe are two totally different animals.
My threshold for what is safe is irrelevant, and we can change laws if we want.
I can walk down to my sidewalk and have a half-ton vehicle going 45 mph drive within 20 feet of me in a moment. There is no question in my mind that that circumstance is much more dangerous than any delivery drone you care to send coming within half that distance. We live with some very generous tolerances for risk.
But to speak to the Blu-Ray player being hurt by the drop, sure, but what makes you think every possible item to be delivered would need to be accounted for in modeling a service like this? I assume there's a narrow band of items that make good candidates, and I'm not interested in hypothetical problems with delivering items that aren't good candidates in the first place.
>> There is ample space to fly right up to my door step without ever coming close to any person or vehicle
You used your threshold for safety as the basis of your argument.
> what makes you think every possible item to be delivered would need to be accounted for in modeling a service like this?
I think this because I highly doubt Amazon wants to make the move to drone delivery in order to move potato chips, or single video games, or movies which cost at most 70 bucks. The aim to automate delivery as a whole through drones, not automating special cases. We're not talking about a set of weights here. I gave the example of a single blu-ray player, which is a reasonable item for delivery.
Even if you want to stay with your special case, dropping items from 20ft in the air, or lowering a drone with spinning propellers to street level, in a city is a issue. Companies don't like potential liability.
It's funny you should say that. I've posted about traffic calming in my neighborhood before! It's calmed in one direction but not the other.
Still, even going 20 or 35 mph is enough to kill someone, and 20 feet is not a lot of room, especially with no barrier between the sidewalk and the car. Last weekend, a driver swerved to hit a car that was stopped in the street and struck the tree on the corner of my lot. Luckily, no one was hurt, but the key word is "luckily." Anyone who'd been on the sidewalk would've been paste.
Compare that to the rather less immediate concern of a drone that might fall out of the sky, a drone that might clip me.
The point of reduced speed is not to avoid killing people when striking them, but to reduce the odds of a driver losing control of a car and ending up on the sidewalk.
Sure, a car going 5 mph is still going to kill you but is easier for the driver to control so it doesn't. But again, "reduce the odds." I don't care how slow you're forced to go around that curve, there's still nothing between you and me on the sidewalk but your hands and feet on the controls.
On the contrary, I sell things online (and through Amazon) and it's common advice that we sellers treat packages as if they will be thrown/dropped, because during shipping they often are. More expensive products tend to have more padding since it's cheaper to add more airbags in than replace the product. And Amazon is of course incentive to not have products break all the time either, their customers wouldn't trust it anymore if it did. From my viewpoint as a seller, customer trust is a huge issue to Amazon. I've seen many high dollar accounts get shut down for potential trust issues.
I agree that there is some protection for drops. However, the expected drop in an Amazon warehouse, or a UPS shipping center is not a 20 foot one. I'd doubt it's even a 10 foot one. I've seen the insides of both of those buildings (my local ones). Things get shaken, stacked, and dropped. A 20 meter drop is ridiculous, and the logistics of getting a drone 10 feet off the ground in a city is still and issue imo.
I suppose it depends on the city, I guess in NYC where there are many people on the sidewalk it would be hard, but in Atlanta I don't think it'd be an issue, there's usually quite a lot of space.
From a physical standpoint, can a drone get to your front door?
I think targets are going to be inevitable. There's no way that a drone is going to be able to deliver to my front porch. It would be much easier to delivery to my deck in back.
The "not driving" part is the key for me personally. I don't really like risking life and limb to buy potato chips.
No, I don't have vertigo, just a healthy aversion to the deadliest routine task most of us engage in. The longer I go without an accident, the more aware I am that for all I do to minimize my risk factors while driving, I have no control over my fellow motorists.
But yeah, a drone could get to my front door. I agree with you, though, that having some way to designate the delivery area might be necessary.
Cities seem like the easiest challenge to tackle. Amazon could work with commercial and residential high rises and put a dock on their rooftops. So, the drone approaches the building rooftop, puts the package in the docking area (that keeps out poor weather), and then flies away. One of the receptionists could then get a notification of a new package, pick it up, and either put it in the appropriate mailbox, or hold it at the desk.
Want to get more advanced and efficient? When your package is delivered, Amazon sends you an access key to the dock. You can now go to the rooftop, type in your access key, and get access to the room to get your package. After it's claimed, your access key expires. This means only people with packages inside the dock have access. Yes, technically if you get a package delivered, you could access the room, and steal a package from someone else. However, there would likely be a camera in the room, and there's a record of you having access, so I can't see it being an issue. You could offset the risk even more by having 10 compartments in the docking area, so there's a 10x less chance of someone else having access to the same compartment. Right now I walk through my modern condo and see packages sitting in front of doors, in hallways without cameras, and there isn't a problem.
There might be 1,000 people living in a high rise, or thousands working in one. It would be easy to get tens of thousands of people access to air deliveries at home and work with a dozen docks. It's also a great selling point for offices and condos. "Our building allows you to receive air deliveries."
A rooftop of a residential high rise isn't a place filled with machinery, it's patio space. The whole top floor is either one or two apartments, has 14' high ceilings, and the very richest live there. They're not gonna want Amazon to land a drone in the middle of their party, nor have anyone come up to say Hi and pick up a package.
That's simply not true. Take a look at Google maps and you'll realize the vast majority of residential high rises are actually filled with equipment, huge fans, loud air-conditioners and empty space. Most have terraces and pools on lower floors, and most penthouses don't have rooftop access.
For example, look at the below image of high rise condos in Chicago. They're all filled with heavy equipment. They're not filled with the super rich having extravagant cocktail parties.
In my experience in NYC, most buildings have some mechanical and some recreational space somewhere on their roofs and/or balconies. Sometimes this is private recreational space, sometimes shared, sometimes a little of both.
You could have a kind of platform coming out of your front window (not necessarily for it to land, but to receive the package). Now imagine it would be fully automated, as the drone approach, the platform comes out or open, receives the items, comes back in. The mailbox of the future. We call it the iPost, and we think you're gonna love it
In Seattle, at least, it's very common for apartments to have tiny private balconies. If a drone can deliver to one of those, it will be more convenient than trying to deal with the average apartment complex's mailroom.
This sounds interesting but there are at least some problems to overcome to make it practical.
How does the drone identify apartment 5b from 4c?
Most balconies like that in my area (Omaha) have another balcony on the next floor up in roughly the same size and shape. How reliable are the flight algorithms when dealing with cielings? How does that affect airflow?
What happens when a drone gets the wrong balcony?
What happens when a drone delivery is canceled because of patio furniture, potted plants, incorrect patio dimension from the local record keepers or whatever other problem with a private landing platform?
None of these are insurmountable, they just haven't been surmounted yet.
My preferred solution for a variety of these is that you buy a transmitter from Amazon, and the drone tries to home in on it once it gets to your address. The ideal transmitter would be wide and flat, so the drone can just drop packages on it, and so any place you could fit it also has a reasonable chance of having enough clearance. You could incentivize buying them using the same mechanics as Amazon's dash buttons.
Doesn't help with complex patio furniture though, and ceilings are a genuinely hard problem. (Most apartments in Seattle are like that too.)
The thing could even fold up for easy storage. If it could unfold to be a square a meter in size (or a bit larger) then Amazon could get even to the point where they land or hover just above.
It could have tiny legs and the actual target area could be a foot above the ground and it could be a net (so the wind the drone makes blows through harmlessly). Then it can catch a package dropped from a few feet.
Amazon, you have my written permission to use this idea and sell me this product.
> How does the drone identify apartment 5b from 4c?
Go out on the balcony with a phone app that prompts you to take pictures of the view in all directions. It sends these along with GPS coordinates to Amazon.
Drone flies to GPS coordinates and then descends until it's views 'match' those in the pictures you took.
In the future, I can imagine having drop off zones (one for every block, e.g. upgraded food/newspaper kiosks in very high density areas), where you can gather your packages if you provide the correct code/QR image. Or even pay only if and when you pick it up?
I can already order groceries online and pick them up myself for a small fee, here in Austria. Using drones would just take it farther and quicker, and I would have a lot more choices available. USB-C adapter I need for my new MacBook RIGHT NOW? Check. That new book? Check. Exotic batteries for my audio equipment? Yep.
If drone delivery becomes an actual thing, roof access for package pickup will be offered as an amenity. Services like Fresh Direct have prompted doorman buildings in NYC to start offering cold storage rooms to keep produce fresh until pickup.
From everyone else in your building? What's top stop the guy in 5B going "Hey... package... thanks" I see a huge uptick in stolen packages. Heck the drones themselves would make a nice parts source flying free over the city. Just have to pick off a couple of them now and then.
I think the point when this becomes in any way practical is really really far off. Interesting demo for sure but pretty sure I'll never have something delivered this way in my lifetime.
A lot of buildings already do that with packages that are delivered to the front door, I doubt in building neighbors stealing your stuff will be an issue.
Yeah, this. UPS/FedEx/USPS just leave packages in the lobby of non-doorman buildings. People tend to respect other people's packages and security cameras help enforce honesty. In years of living in Manhattan I've only had one package go missing -- turned out that it was stolen by the UPS driver (new iPhone on release day in a Verizon branded box).
On one hand, the pool of likely suspects is rather small, and the punishment can actually be rather big if it's USPS, since it's a federal crime. I see that mail fraud laws apply to other carriers such as UPS/Fedex, but I'm not sure if that also extends to mail theft. That said, the reason it applies is because they cross state lines, so I'm not sure if the specific case has to include that as well, which if we're talking about drone delivery, is unlikely.
Most apartment buildings without a doorman already have this going on, and have for years. My building has a pile of amazon boxes everyday by the front door
I can see drones being used in cities to dump packages into the top of packet vending machines that already exist, that open up with a PIN code. It'd be much easier too because the route can be hardcoded towards the machine.
That's a good idea. Combine it with a DHL Packstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packstation in every building, or, in more suburbian areas, every street, and you solved deliveries.
In cities, delivery drivers ship 600 packages/day into packet vending machines, vs only 60 regular delivery, and regular deliveries via usps cost less than $2 for amazon.,
So i don't think a drone , in this high density case could offer much savings.
Why does this argument keep coming up? "This product will fail because less than 100% of people can make use of it" I see the same thing all the time for electric cars: "Won't work, because not everyone has a garage for charging".
What new product ever had an addressable market of 6 billion people on launch? Do people not realize that you can still have a successful product even if your market is limited to 100 million customers?
I noticed that their first customer lives in the wilderness and the package got delivered a substantial distance from his house. I'm sure that will get better with time, but for right now it definitely seems stunt-like. I guess they have to start somewhere.
many urban buildings have rooftop access. having a landing pad (could be nothing more than a rubber mat with a giant QR code on it) would be workable if the resident can confirm a delivery time to be on the roof. or they could leave the package there, if the building residents use it like a shared mail area.
having said all that this idea of drones flying around all over the place semiautonomously is crazy to me. maybe i'm getting old.
This is a good point. Drones will probably be used for very prompt delivery. So the problem of unsecured packages will probably not be that important, for the same reasons that the problem of unsecured delivered pizzas is not that important.
Comparing to human costs of Amazon's preferred shipping method: USPS's subsidized parcel injection. The last mile belongs to USPS. In the urban environment, that's about 15 minute per parcel at $20 per hour (labor plus trucks). I.e., $5 per parcel. For FedEx, the cost of the entire expedition process is roughly $6.6 per parcel ($43bn cost of revenue for 6.5bn deliveries), so the last mile costs less than that.
Flirtey CEO Matt Sweeny suggests $10 per drone delivery. He doesn't specify from where. I assume he also means the last mile.
Are drones more expensive than humans? Air is expensive. Think of helicopters vs cars. With all congestion, helicopters have not become the vehicle of choice. They're noisy and can land only in certain locations. Most urban areas are too dangerous for them.
Air drones inherit these disadvantages.
As for Amazon, it'd have to stop outsourcing delivery to postal services and build a lot of physical infrastructure. Few tech companies are comfortable with this because they become capital intensive businesses, which they don't like.
So, not Amazon and not air drones. Perhaps ground vehicles within city borders and only after cars learn driving without humans. That's 5-10 more years.
I'm certain drone delivery will be a premium service for some time to come, even with Amazon working tirelessly to do their own logistics the cost of purchasing drones, maintaining them, keeping enough spare batteries charged, etc. is not $0. I already pay $4 at minimum for next-day delivery with Amazon Prime, if they want to charge me $6 to get a kit of memory or a cable in 30 minutes instead of having to drive to Best Buy (and pay a lot more than $6 extra for) I would happily do so.
> it'd have to stop outsourcing delivery to postal services and build a lot of physical infrastructure
What do you think Amazon has spent the last couple years doing? Amazon Flex isn't just some gimmick, it's part of a huge push into adding last-mile capabilities.
is 10$ the cost the customer pays, or the cost of the delivery? I highly doubt the little electricity (or maintenance cost over time) is 10$ per delivery.
Also, as a straight comparison, drones are faster, scale better and are able to work at hours humans wouldn't. So even if it was 5$ vs 10$, some could argue that it's worth it. Obviously not in all situations, but sometimes there's an item you need right now and not tomorrow.
$10 is the "willingness to pay" (the number is in the article). There's no good estimate of drone delivery costs since the interested parties cherrypick locations and distance.
These drones are a lot smaller than helicopters, which will avoid many of the disadvantages of helicopters. It'll greatly reduce noise, fuel consumption, and risk of injury or death, and greatly increase the number of places where it can take off and land.
Also, "Amazon’s proposed use of drones may drive down the cost to deliver small packages crosstown to as little as $1, a fraction of existing same-day delivery options, according to a 2015 study by New York-based ARK Invest that tried to quantify the savings from the use of drones compared with delivery trucks and couriers."
Most data I've seen does actually suggest that drones won't be cost competitive with delivery trucks anytime soon - esp. across cities. However, speed can indeed be a USP that would be difficult to match with delivery trucks.
While the technology to move a package from point A to point B safely and autonomously is pretty cool, I think the more interesting story is what will happen to enable this feat. One thing Amazon has done right over the years has been figuring out how to blow away existing practices and technologies in the shipping and fulfillment space to replace or upgrade them with processes or tech allowing for ridiculous savings in cost and time.
The "13 min -- click to delivery." is really neat but there are so many services necessary to bring it to reality that are really fascinating as well:
1) The website itself probably speaking to dozens of micro services to take the order and complete the order.
2) The fulfillment of the order in an automated warehouse. For the most part, a huge robotic fleet is employed to find, process, package, and ready a package for delivery.
3) The movement of the package to the drone delivery platform or fleet.
3a) The attachment or delivery of the payload to the drone itself.
4) The delivery, tracking, and confirmation of delivery, for the package itself.
5) The return, maintenance, and readiness completion of the drone for the next flight.
All of these processes are going to involve dozens of technologies, robots, humans, global services, local services, legal regulations, and more. The video shows a small garage and a single unit on tracks with a human finishing the packaging. All of this will have to replaced, scaled, and automated in a variety of capacities before this becomes cost effective.
Really interesting time to be alive to watch these processes evolve as they will be almost invisible and taken for granted in the next 20 years or so.
As a person who gets outstanding benefits (& some $) making deliveries I think this is great.
Getting mail 6 days a week is not necessary. And if this allows a knife to cut out all highway routes and some rural ones and replace with only drones that would be advancement. Mail is not a right but glued now to legislation. No need if nothing-above-me areas get only drone service.
I ponder this. As the ups and FedEx and Usps guys converge in the same address, we often talk shop. I wonder what an Amazon drone would say to a competitor drone when they are at/near the same address? "Man, my supervisor is always watching me?" or "they loaded up this flier unbalanced"
I noticed it didn't deliver a holiday fruit cake. Probably due to the weight limit. Logistics will get better but without some weight increase this is going to be a long way off from useful.
This is a first generation attempt at a solution and you are already wanting it to deliver terrible things like fruitcake, you terrorist!
Seriously, this is a not the final form these will take. If there is any economic niche that this can fill it will fill it. Then as prices come down, technology improves, autonomy increases or niches open this will grow and improve.
Given how many bad things people saying about the culture, especially the turnover rate of engineers there, how can they manage to keep things run smoothly and keep introducing new things with the cutting edge technologies.
<sarcasm>
Cost of specialized drone wherehouse in remote England: $1.2mm
Cost of 3+yrs of R&D of drone fleet: $436mm
Cost of delivering first package: priceless
</sarcasm>
I'm not sure how this is ever going to compare with a truck and driver, especially when the truck will be self-driving in less than a decade.
Or...better yet, there would be a self-driving truck/flat-bed which drives close to a certain city-center area, and has on its bed a mini-fleet of drones, these drones will lift-off from the truck instead of the fulfillment hub...these smaller drones would deliver it to the front door. Alternatively, the self-driving truck could have a cartoon-like robotic arm that extends to the customer's front door; ringing the doorbell automatically and dropping the package on the doormat. ;-)
I'm trying not to be cynical, but to me this still feels like there is a huge gap between now and scaling this into urban areas.
As other commenters have pointed out, how is Amazon going to operate drone fleets in cities?
Of course we must take small steps to get to the Amazon utopia, but we must question how much hype there is on these kinds of 'demos'. After all, it's drone technology demonstrating pickup/dropoff over rural land.
Vacations are already being soiled by people flying loud drones in areas of natural beauty, now we get to have our day-to-day skies soiled by fleets of drones delivering popcorn.
Am I the only one who doesn't want this specifically because of the noise nuisance?
Delivery trucks are way more quiet for each ton of goods they deliver. I’d rather have two trucks filled to the top on the road once a day instead of dozens of delivery drones delivering goods around the clock. It means the customer won’t get his toothbrush 30 minutes after ordering but at least the rest can live in peace.
Fewer jobs, not less, and yes, that does sound wonderful to me. You think that sounds like some kind of dystopia, there being more people alive who perhaps have to look for different jobs? Versus those same people being dead and people still doing tedious work we could automate? I think that sounds more dystopian, personally.
Delivery vehicles that can be replaced by drones are what, 0.1% to 1% of all vehicles maybe? So you'll have both the same car traffic and the noise from drones ;-)
With that quick of a click to delivery, do you really think you'll have the same car traffic? The amount of times you'd need to drive to get anything would dramatically decrease.
That's sort of true now. No one really has to go to Target because we have Amazon Prime Pantry, but I still see that place full of cars. I don't have any numbers, but I'm willing to bet delivery commerce has increased dramatically in the last ten years, but I doubt traffic has decreased proportionally.
Agreed on the perceived futility of these efforts. Even Amazon knows its silly: "First starting with 2 customers and the moving to DOZENS!" Woo hoo good job guys!
But first can we please solve the leafblower problem? Modern american suburbia is already ruined by an almost constant 120dB buzz and pollution & smell of cheap 2-stroke engine exhaust.
My prediction within the next 10 years, a majority of jurisdictions will ban 2-stroke leaf blowers. Electric leaf blowers are a thing now. A combination of pollution control and noise control, along with a viable alternative, will gather enough support for these bans.
(I’m not sure what portion of leaf blower noise is caused by the fan vs. the engine. I suspect even if the fan creates the larger component, it’s probably less annoying than the buzz of a two stroke engine).
EDIT: At the moment, I think gas powered units are still more powerful. But with battery technology going the way it is, and prices falling, I’d be surprised if a backpack electric unit doesn’t become cheap enough to rival current gas units. And even with some reduced power, users may prefer it to having to mix oil and maintain the units.
I have a plug-in electric leaf blower, and it is very loud. Enough that I'm self conscious about using it, unless there is other noise around to drown it out.
All power tools are noisy, but the gasoline operated tools designed for mowing lawns and blowing leaves are an affront to humanity and nature, not only because of noise and smell, but because they are designed to do an incomprehensibly counterproductive task for the sake of owners misguided sense of ego and 'curb appeal'.
Cue the torrent of entitled comments explaining to me that they like their freshly cut lawns (not by them of course, but by minimum wage landscapers) and consider it their fundamental human right.
It takes more time than a leaf blower. Especially around shrubs and hardscape. There’s a reason professional gardeners use leaf blowers after all, even though they’re way more expensive than a rake and require more maintenance.
I've flown in an area with 15 or so of 4/6/8 rotor UAVs in relatively close proximity all about 250-350ft up and not only could you not hear them at all, you couldn't really see them either (the octorcopters looked vaguely like a bird). That was kind of the point of the event, we were all FPV flying and cooperatively calling out maneuvers to avoid hitting each other.
(Edit: I'm obviously talking about it not hovering directly over your head at this altitude, in that case you will hear it. I'm talking about it passing over you at a fast horizontal speed at 300ft above you that you won't hear it unless your in near dead silent environment with no background white noise).
At 400ft up, you're not going to hear a thing. Would wager that even if I told you it was there you would not be able to locate it in a timely manner, let alone be annoyed by it.
Probably, but I am unsure what part of the regulations they are required to follow. I'm more familiar with human operator/FPV drones, mainly racing quads. Even if they're only flying at 300ft to be safe I still very much doubt you will hear anything. My race quads are pretty loud but in my experiences with larger slower moving ones they can be pretty quiet once a short distance away from you is reached. Mostly attributed to the props being larger, slower spinning, and less aggressive.
It depends a lot on the wind and the size/shape of the propellers. When I fly my DJI UAVs up near 400 feet above ground on a zero-wind day it's very easy to hear when I'm outside. When they get to be ~500 feet away it's much harder to hear. I've never been inside while flying, but my wife says she can't hear it when she's inside. On a breezy day, the wind through the trees covers most of the noise while I'm outside, but the variation in the noise when the flight computer is compensating for wind makes it a little easier to pick out.
Bottom line: you'll probably be able to hear these large Amazon UAVs when you're outdoors and when they're within 500 feet of you.
Interesting, technically don't home owners own the air above their house up to several hundred feet? What if I don't want it flying over me, can I knock it down?
The law about air rights isn't definitive. The closest seems to be a 1946 Supreme Court case (US vs. Causby). However, the general consensus seems to be that home owners have at least some degree of air rights up to some hundreds of feet.
In general, you don't have the right to destroy property in retaliation for trespassing though, especially if you'd be violating other laws by doing so such as discharging a weapon in the vicinity of other people/houses.
Aviation law likely trumps that, especially for explicitly permitted (commercial license) operations. And in most countries "dangerous interference with aircraft" or something similar has pretty harsh penalties attached.
I think there already have been a few example cases, so there should be info at least for the US.
Knock it down? Like with a gun? I would call the cops so fast if one of my neighbors were firing a gun in the air to, hur hur, hit a drone.
That is such a dangerous and irresponsible thing to propose, unless you're out in the country, on your own land, with enough of your own land around you that your bullets won't come crashing down onto the rest of us.
I imagine they'll mostly fly over streets. That would also reduce risk of catastrophic failure killing a pedestrian, since a typical car roof can certainly survive impact of one of these things.
It would also mitigate sound issues since road-noise would easily drown out a 400ft high drone.
Both the noise and sight of drones is unpleasant. I can't imagine rich people wanting a stream of drones flying over their homes. One more thing poor people will have to put up with in the future.
I guess we shouldn't have planes or cars either because they make noise.
This is a massive step forward technologically for consumers. With every new technology I've noticed that there's always that croud of people that oppose it, talking nostalgically of the good old days when we didn't have phones or the internet.
Just for a second can we marvel at what has been accomplished here? Deliveries aside, ordinary people can buy, or even make, devices that _fly_. Actually fly. How anyone can just take it for granted and then dismiss it by saying it makes noise is beyond me.
> I guess we shouldn't have planes or cars either because they make noise.
But we've adapted our cities to accommodate this. We have zoning rules, traffic engineering, sound barriers, and so on to accommodate or redirect this noise and those solutions have been developed over the last century.
We had the same problem with cars when they were first on roads [0]. You can't expect people not to have a problem with drones until we are able to adapt our planning and design to their existence.
[0] For more on this, I recommend Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City by Peter Norton.
We as technologists need to also learn to think beyond the technology. We need to think about broader impact of our tech. Especially social and psychological impacts.
Why not? We have the tools. The only barrier sense to be our ego. We view something as net positive and as a technical marvel and become upset at any suggestion that there maybe be done undesirable consequences.
I know this won't be the popular opinion here. But the least we can do is learn to engage these kinds of thoughts. Perhaps middle ground can be found. Dismissing them helps nobody.
Vacations are already being soiled by people driving loud vehicles in areas of natural beauty, now we get to have our day-to-day countryside soiled by fleets of cars and trucks delivering popcorn.
Note I'm explicitly making a vague, handwavy argument in the direction of current laws about property owners and their ownership of the airspace over their property, as I am not anywhere near expert enough to opine on how that would precisely manifest in this case. I'm only opining that there exists already law that matters.
I wonder how much the tech can change to reduce the noise. Maybe something similar to what Noctua does with their computer fans. It just seems like all the research has gone into making the props as powerful as possible while using the least amount of energy.
If I recall correctly, the Dyson air dryer was tuned to sound more like white noise than just a noisy fan. Maybe that's a solution too.
Cars are already ubiquitous and really, really loud. We tend to forget this because we're all so used to it. From the first values I could find with decent sourcing, at a distance of 25 feet, a car driving by at reasonably high speed is 77 dB, while a drone is 65 dB. I live 500 feet from a freeway, with lots of buildings between here and there, and I can still hear clearly hear the traffic indoors with windows closed.
I imagine these amazon drones are at least quieter than most consumer drones just based on their larger propellers. This is operating on the assumption that a larger propeller can spin slower to generate the same amount of thrust as a smaller propeller spinning faster, which might not be 100% accurate.
Motor noise in general seems like it's kind of an overlooked issue though.
We just need to pop an anti-gravity engine on the bottom instead of using air-propulsion. Then, to reduce the visual pollution, we just cloak them with an invisibility shield. It's really that simple.
I'm sure Amazon already has this on their roadmap.
Don't worry, I predict drone sniping will become a new favorite vandalism of the youth. For those on the more nefarious side, theft from drones will probably be common. Bring it down in your vicinity, take the payload.
It has to come down to deliver. Even if doing roof deliveries, if they are on a roof within a building or two, they won't be that far away from the drone.
Plenty of young people put good skills to use in stupid ways until they get older (and some never hit "until"). Sometimes it's how they develop those skills in the first place.
The big reason why I think this is likely is the same as why I think it's more likely with autonomous car package delivery. An employee is a wildcard in the equation, they may care above all reason about the crime, and that can be the difference between easy money and going to jail.
What about using a drone to take down another drone? Also, a drone need not be taken down by physically attacking it. Its command and control system could conceivably be hacked.
If I wanted to, I could just walk around and take packages off as many stoops as I wanted.
Why don't I? Because it is illegal.
Of course 'youths' are going to do dumb things but I am doubtful theft from drones are going to become illegal. Although that brings up the point of stealing packages using drones for anonymity.
A lot of the valid issues people have with this concept is about the cost of flying a drone half-way across a city to deliver a single item, but I think that's just the way Amazon are pitching it at the moment. I think it's much more likely that they'll have a fleet of self driving vans with a few of these in the back - it pulls up to the end of your road/block/village and lets them loose for a few deliveries before moving onto the next place. Not quite as fast as the 13 minutes they're quoting, but much more feasible and potentially much faster than a bloke in a van.
Autonomous trucks and cars will be here long before drone delivery is actually a thing. For now Amazon can get easy free press for delivering popcorn... they might as well start a group focused on carrier pigeon delivery.
I think both have their benefits. Drones probably work better as a last mile kind of solution where time is a factor (roads can be much more congested than the air)
It seems regulation in this area is inevitable. Similar to how AT&T was regulated because of the natural monopoly of phone cables to all homes (it doesn't make sense for each phone company to have it's own cable going to every home).
The air doesn't have infinite capacity. What happens when Google, Microsoft, Walmart, Target, etc. all try to operate their own drone fleets? At a minimum, there must be a common protocol to coordinate all this drone air traffic. Or maybe it's better to recognize it as a natural monopoly and only allow one regulated drone fleet.
Matching the video to the local geography, looks like it starts at Heath Farm: https://binged.it/2hPbvaN
There's an implication in the story and some comments that this is a rural location, but it's quite close to Cambridge - ARM's HQ is only about 2 miles away. It's open country between ARM and Heath Farm, but as Cambridge airport isn't much further, deliveries there might be a bit tricky.
Safety angle. Every item going on domestic aircraft is scanned for bombs etc.. Safety is a Usps priority. After Unabomber where all mail from west coast went via truck till he was caught and 911 Usps is insane about nothing blowing up an aircraft with postal stuff in its manifest.
Those things aren't even legal in the US, and I'm sure that if you were caught using one by a company like Amazon, they'd quickly put you on the hook for the bill.
Why does the drone have to be wheeled out on tracks so far away from the shop for takeoff? It looks like this center may have been used for early testing where they were less confident in the drone's ability to takeoff
Also, it's interesting that they rely on fiducials placed on the ground to track the drop off point. I'd expect them to be using GPS + vision to figure out a dropoff point. Humans are really good at that, you'd think some algorithm would be good enough for 99% of the cases and save the customer time (with fiducials as a decent fallback for tricky buildings/houses)
> And I see legitimate questions downvoted already. The amazon shill is real.
Please don't complain about downvotes or accuse other users of astroturfing or shilling — the first is explicitly against the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and the second is a notorious poison (late edit: and in the guidelines now too).
You expect it will one day just pop in to existence from nothing, and there are no milestones along the way to celebrate? I rate your comment 1/5 stars.
This is what bothered me too. "Hey everyone, we delivered to our first real customer!"
Then shows the "customer" with a full camera crew, obvious UI mocks, and great looking warehouse workers I have a hard time believing aren't paid actors. Like most things these days, it's probably a paid for PR article lightly disguised as authentic.
You should try shooting some clays in your neighbourhood. I'd be surprised if it would take more then ten minutes for you to be acquainted with your Miranda rights.
Actually, I suppose it's just as likely that you'd be acquainted with a coroner.
Oh, I think a few people will try - until they get chased down by "Order Fulfillment Assurance Drones" and carried away to a nearby unregistered warehouse for interrogation.
I think the comparison between robbing a truck and a drone is naive at best.
Would you consider the same robbing a truck, probably threatening the driver at gun point, being seen by him, to grabbing a package from the claps of a drone?
You know that more than 5 UPS trucks have been hijacked in the last 5 years so I don't know why you are asking me for such a silly comparison. I have no proof but I would guess amount of people that will [Hijack a UPS truck] < [Shoot down a drone].
@lighybyte
I think UPS truck hijackers are motivated, violent criminals. A couple of dumb teenagers, armed with a potato gun would probably shoot at a drone just for the hell of it + criminals + overly protective property owners
Sure! The comment I replied to, seems to imply that hijacking UPS trucks is a non-existent, or rare event. A simple Google Search seems to indicate that it happens all the time. There for making the original OPs concern somewhat valid.
Your logic is off. If you spend a lot of time around goats then worrying about a goat attack is valid. Similar to how people in North Dakota do not worry about hurricane but people in the Florida Keys do.
