Amazon Unveils Futuristic Helicopter-Plane Hybrid Drone for Deliveries
bloomberg.com
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Noise is my main concern with drone delivery networks. I have been playing with radio controlled aircraft for most of my life. I see drone delivery as inevitable, but living near a noisy drone delivery route could really lower quality of life for the people on the ground.
What about 20-50 lb flying machines falling onto sidewalks, roofs, and streets?
You don't see amateur RC aviation enthusiasts flying their model airplanes in the middle of the city, and I sure as hell don't want to see a corporation doing this on an industrial scale.
Why not ground-based drone delivery?
Has this faith been shaken by the recent 737 Max issues?
My guess personally, is that drone delivery will ultimately just be a tool for a self driving truck to get the package from the truck to the door. Drones are not nearly good enough as it stands today to do end to end deliveries at an industrial scale outside of maybe a few rural areas.
But also, no. Not the same people.
[0] https://www.faa.gov/about/plans_reports/congress/media/fy17_...
So, to the extent the Boeing 737 MAX team is not reviewing Amazon's applications, no, not the same people.
Risks: See everything else
Do you really, like I mean _really_ need your stuff from Amazon same day, hours after ordering it? No, you really don't. Nobody does. It's a convenience, a nice-to-have, but is totally unnecessary.
So, I think the burden of proof lays squarely on Amazon and it's proponents of this type of service, to prove beyond any reasonable doubt the risks can be mitigated to the point where the public accepts them as a trade-off.
Having potentially 50lbs of drone fall on your car while you're driving home from work is probably not going to be acceptable... to name just one risk that will have to be proven to be minimized. Or noise levels will be controlled near neighborhoods etc... Other industries have to prove their new thing is safe and acceptable for the public... why should Amazon be any different?
The same could be asked of 2-day home-delivery 20 years back, or 2-day world-travel 200 years back. Yet, here we are.
If necessity is the mother of invention, laziness is the father.
If you look at the first FAA waivers to operate drones industrially -- 5 years ago! -- you will notice that all of the approved drones are military drones. Why military drones? Because the approved drones often had a decade or more of operational use in explicitly hostile environments and very poorly controlled conditions. Being able to reliably operate in those conditions was considered strong evidence they were unlikely to start falling out of the sky when operated under much better controlled environments and less risky conditions.
The challenge for many new drone builders is that their platforms are not built anywhere close to the reliability and resilience standards of military drone systems, which are typical the product of companies with proven aviation/avionics systems engineering experience and bankrolled by US defense spending. Even when they build systems that on paper meet this level of engineering, the lack of operational history and experience puts these drones on the slow path to approval.
Amazon getting the FAA to sign off on industrial use of an exotic drone airframe with no operational history strongly suggests that its safety and resilience characteristics are excellent, at least comparable to drones designed to survive military environments.
That drone is pretty big, and they're getting extra lift out of the wings which conveniently double as prop guards. Flight time is presumably at least an hour, if it can get something to a customer in half an hour (and has to get back). You'd need quite a few since each drone can therefore only make around 10-20 deliveries a day if they swap out the batteries when it lands. 30 mile round trip range is pretty decent. Also on size - you need somewhere to land it with a few metres wriggle room either side. There's no way that's going into a built up area.
There's no point doing drone delivery in urban environments, the safety case is insane and you're competing with excellent existing delivery channels.
I foresee ads for rakes when Amazon notices that there are lots of leaves in my yard.
I don't know why people think this is a good thing right now.
I would gladly trade the inconvenience of not being immediately aware of rake-buying opportunities for privacy and peace of mind.
No wonder they chose to play classical music over this video.
When was the last time a UPS truck drove over your house / apartment / etc?
Mind if I ask where the law comes from? I'm assuming that you're talking about the United States - is this a federal/state/local law?
But to be fair, the frequencies are quite different.
This is orders of magnitude less noise than 20 drones, coming and going, throughout the day. (Not to mention the ones passing overhead, to deliver to the next block down...)
RC Helis 60 Size Gas back in the old days. You had to manually control everything. You had to built it from scratch. [1] The ones they have now are so simple and easy they are no fun at all. I wonder if you feel the same way?
I am still not getting how this is possible given weather conditions and variability.
[1] Electric? Only thing like that I ever saw was at the hobby shop (remember those) and it had a power cord attached and was plugged into an extension cord and being tested out back.
Thats exactly what I'm trying to do here (sort of), I'm like 2 years in on the project and I've only just begun to actually test the thing. https://github.com/castis/currant
The last thing I want is to add to the power lines, airplanes, etc. with the visual noise when I'm on my deck trying to enjoy nature.
Further, Amazon is a major player in the advertising space now. I'd be surprised if at some point these weren't leveraged to display ads in some format. I'm a marketer by trade, but personally that's a line I don't want crossed.
Then don't look up in a couple of years when SpaceX has HUNDREDS of satellites ruining the night sky.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/01/science/starlink-spacex-a...
Also now we have a century worth of experience to apply to deciding to add new vehicles to our environment.
And finally for the most part cars, trucks etc are primarily fixed routes - roads. We know where they are, there's planning and committees around design and disruption before they are set in place.
Drones move in a 3 dimensional space, with no set routes, and very few no fly zones.
Basically imagine a moped that can fly over your property or circle where you live looking for an address.
Not to even mention the privacy issues, most cars are still lacking in cameras, or scanning technology. Delivery drones will need that stuff to be standard.
When the initial hype about Amazon drone delivery came out I remember saying it wouldn't work cause multi-rotor drones are so inefficient.
This will make it work... it'll use a fraction of the electricity if it cruises in "plane mode".
If the max Payload is 5lbs I doubt it's going to weigh 50lbs. Maybe 10-20lbs, but the battery weight is the big thing.
That'll depend how efficient the wing is. Usually there's trade-offs when doing a hybrid design (see V-22 Osprey).
Perhaps the trade-off is still a net benefit in that configuration though...
> If the max Payload is 5lbs I doubt it's going to weigh 50lbs. Maybe 10-20lbs
Not sure, in my RC flying experience, these aircraft can't lift much weight at all. Ounces are a serious concern, let alone pounds. Adding 1/4 extra weight is a big deal for something this small and without large wings to generate lift - the rotors are going to have to do a lot of work to get off the ground.
It'll probably need to be a pretty big aircraft to have enough battery carrying capacity to guarantee a safe round-trip with possible complications with wind, loiter time for safe landing, obstacle avoidance, etc, and big enough to support the 5lbs load without impacting flight characteristics too much.
But remember the wing design is competing against "no wing" so it is easy to be a huge improvement. Normal drones don't really get to throttle down and they have to do all their flight controls through engine speed adjustments. Normal flight controls use almost no power & when this thing builds up a head of steam it will be able to throttle back to cruise.
It looks like a closed edge biplane when it transitions.. the closed edges help efficiency. It can probably be optimized for a very narrow speed range as well so I bet they can come up with a very nice airfoil design.
Perhaps. It could also be mostly to stabilize the aircraft in forward flight, since that's more efficient by itself with a "pulling" rotor than a traditional quad-copter setup (using differential thrust from each motor to control movement and stability).
The closed wing doesn't look very large, so we'll have to see just how much lift they actually get out of it. The airfoil design may not generate much or any lift but instead just be used for control, such as a typical horizontal/vertical stabilizer of an aircraft.
Or perhaps it does generate some lift and helps a bit. Just looks rather small for that role, but I could be wrong. RC aircraft often defy principles that apply to their full-sized brethren.
> (FTA): Amazon declined to release some specifics on the device, citing trade secrets
I guess we'll just have to wait for some more specifics.
Was hoping they'd release more details. It's not like RC aircraft have much secret sauce to them... other than Amazon's proprietary package compartment.
Not even that...
Drones can't go that far. They can only carry tiny payloads. They use a ton of energy just to hover. And lastly- they are much more dangerous than ground-based transport, for the simple reason that _they can fall from the sky_.
Whats to be gained by putting deliveries in the air?
I wish Mr Bezos would focus on something of real value- asteroid mining and transferal of polluting industries off-world.
The truth is almost every mode of transport is selfish. It's always selfish, until everyone starts using it, at which point it's revolutionary.
Everything looks bad in hindsight right? But it is the car that enabled the progression that makes the car impractical.
People want it, not need. People pay for things they want as well as need.
The drones have no driver (thus lower margins and/or a richer Amazon, neither of which are necessarily good for inequality, though it does free up more humanity from mundane tasks like delivering parcels), and can be loaded quickly and automatically. The article mentions they can carry 5 lbs, which I suspect is enough to carry a few deliveries at once. As the article mentions, 80% of their sales are less than 5 lbs.
All that said, the noise pollution is going to be horrendous. The visual pollution I don't mind so much, as it _may_ allow cities to lower the number of cars on the road (fewer people driving to run errands), though it's definitely going to feel creepy and dystopian, especially if Amazon are the only ones running these things and there isn't _extremely_ strong privacy oversight.
40,000 people are killed every year in the US by ground-based transport.
https://www.digitalspy.com/tech/a820748/amazon-prime-air-dro...
As for which house, that's via geocoding (convert postal code to GPS). Reasonably accurate for North America, unclear about other parts of the world.
So the drone is automated for most of the time, but still uses manual for dropping off on doorstep.
Also it would be interesting to see what their power electronics look like. You get a 20x reduction in thrust demands by going from hover to flight mode, but the problem is that the efficiency of brushless motors also tends to be absolutely dreadful when you run them at 5% throttle.
Lots of talk about vision, no mention of LIDAR. Computer vision is getting better faster than LIDAR is getting cheaper, expect a lidar-less future.
Do you believe that the future is LIDAR-less, or that the delivery drone future is LIDAR-less?
Additionally, redundancy is good. Computer vision will not be good enough to make Lidar useless for some time.
Still, hitting one of these in a 152 could be fatal. Pilots are wary of drones for a reason. However, I think they'd be more receptive to the idea of Amazon using them than a random person (assuming Amazon cooperates with the FAA).
It's cool but only if you stop thinking how all of this is a hack around the utter failure of planning at any interesting scale in gsi country.
whoever solves drone delivery will disrupt the convenience store market. its right there in the name.
https://hackaday.com/2012/07/01/spoofing-gps-and-getting-you...
(I would point out that the main reason people have objected to drones flying over their property is privacy: up to now, the only use-case for a drone is remote viewing – which some would find creepy/intrusive. I would posit that now drones can theoretically offer tangible real-world benefits --e.g. parcel delivery-- this will gradually fade out as an objection for most people - just as most people would tolerate a postman delivering letters to their house.)
But, if she uses a satellite TV dish to aim the output of a magnetron at that drone, well, that’s another story.
Push your tongue against the top of your mouth and say 'ung', it's usually close enough (also holds for the common vietnamese name of Nguyen)
Specifically, it's the velar nasal phonome:
Gur Kimchi is evidently Jewish, and his name appears to be a variation of the Sephardic Jewish family name Kimhi. It evolved independently of the Korean name for their side dish, seeing as how they're from different language families