Amazon has made its first drone delivery to an actual customer
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
So i don't think a drone , in this high density case could offer much savings.
My building's roof is at least as secure as its lobby.
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.
Who knows really? Don't mind me, just going to take my AA gun back home.
(Plus, let's also factor in the fact firing weapons inside a city is illegal. But don't mind me)
Basic human decency, reciprocal honesty, a $60 Wifi surveillance camera.
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.
At the end of the day it's a lot easier for theieves to just follow the UPS truck.
I am still waiting for Prime Now in Vancouver!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
By chance, do you have vertigo?
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.
[0]: http://ftp.dot.state.tx.us/pub/txdot-info/trf/crash_statisti...
having said all that this idea of drones flying around all over the place semiautonomously is crazy to me. maybe i'm getting old.
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
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.
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.
Doesn't help with complex patio furniture though, and ceilings are a genuinely hard problem. (Most apartments in Seattle are like that too.)
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.
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.
It makes no sense in dense urban environments in the same sense that storage lockers don't make sense in the burbs.
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."
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.
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?
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 $10 per drone delivery. He doesn't specify from where. I assume he also means the last mile.
Are drones more expensive than humans? Air is expensive. Think of helicopters vs cars. With all congestion, helicopters have not become the vehicle of choice. They're noisy and can land only in certain locations. Most urban areas are too dangerous for them.
Air drones inherit these disadvantages.
As for Amazon, it'd have to stop outsourcing delivery to postal services and build a lot of physical infrastructure. Few tech companies are comfortable with this because they become capital intensive businesses, which they don't like.
So, not Amazon and not air drones. Perhaps ground vehicles within city borders and only after cars learn driving without humans. That's 5-10 more years.
Also, as a straight comparison, drones are faster, scale better and are able to work at hours humans wouldn't. So even if it was 5$ 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.
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.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-30/it-s-amaz...
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."
Edit: Also interesting: https://www.flexport.com/blog/drone-delivery-economics/
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
I note as well that in a city like Oxford (UK) many/most houses do in fact have gardens. Different cities, different solutions. Not everywhere is NYC
Am I the only one who doesn't want this specifically because of the noise nuisance?
I'm sure Amazon already has this on their roadmap.
Motor noise in general seems like it's kind of an overlooked issue though.
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.
(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.
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.
Of course watering it every day then cutting it in the summer (rather then just let it turn a bit brown and stop growing) is idiocy.
And maybe also a tarp if there is some distance to move the leaves.
Can anyone with more quadcopter experience describe how noisy that is? I know they are loud when they are nearby, but 400ft is far.
One single drone may not produce a lot of noise but a whole group of them might be a different story.
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.
It would also mitigate sound issues since road-noise would easily drown out a 400ft high drone.
I think there already have been a few example cases, so there should be info at least for the US.
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.
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.
(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).
Buzzing over the street in my neighborhood is a lot less intrusive than flying directly over my house.
Obviously it would be a longer route, but maybe the trade off would be worth it.
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.
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.
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.
Eventually sooner or later you will have state/gov/some department to regulate how much noise those can make.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Can we not wait 2 or 3 days to receive an order?
Do we have to have everything right now?
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13177746 and marked it off-topic.
UPS truck hijacked in Boston: http://boston.cbslocal.com/2016/11/10/dorchester-ups-truck-c...
UPS truck hijacked in Milwaukee: http://fox6now.com/2015/12/11/it-seems-to-be-getting-worse-m...
UPS truck hijacked in Florida: http://www.wptv.com/news/region-st-lucie-county/fort-pierce/...
Georgia: http://www.cbs46.com/story/15389422/stolen-ups-trailers-foun...
This doesn't mean that I need to worry about goat attacks.
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?
Actually, I suppose it's just as likely that you'd be acquainted with a coroner.