Hacker News Reader

Curious how well it will deal with locating the correct place at the correct house to deliver the package? One way to achieve this might be to only use the drone after a human delivery person has delivered a package and tagged in Amazon's map database where packages should be dropped. Or perhaps the house resident uploads a picture of their house with the drop location?

View on HN

Maybe residents would place beacons where they want the drones to land?

Indeed, the beacon is a landing pad that customers place in their front or backyards (ideally back). See (3) in the following link:

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.

I think having a human take over via video for the last 30-60 seconds would work pretty well.

So the drone is automated for most of the time, but still uses manual for dropping off on doorstep.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com