Google Wing Launching US Drone Deliveries with FedEx, Walgreens
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Wing has about 10km round-trip (unclear if that's radius or total distance traveled), while Zipline has about 80km radius or 160km round-trip range. Wing has a speed of about 60mph (then slows to a hover for extending the package) while Zipline travels at 80mph.
And not just serving a small city of 20,000 but Rwanda, a nation of 12 million (and now much of Ghana, population of 28 million, and soon the state of Maharashtra in India with a population of over 100 million).
I really think the catapult and parachute approach is significantly more effective than the hover-and-deploy one is. There are some marginal advantages to hovering, but the drawbacks in range, efficiency, time, and annoyance to the neighbors outweigh them.
The advantages to hovering may be relevant in dense cities, but these are exactly the places which would not want lots of drones flying around everywhere (certainly not hovering like that).
Still, much safer than delivery vans and I hope Wing is successful.
Real Engineering [1] and Wendover Productions [2] have really nice videos about their system currently deployed in Rwanda.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEbRVNxL44c [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnoUBfLxZz0
My best idea would be a flywheel, because for 5kg mass (including a sled/rope), and assuming force-limited operation, you'd need 100kW peak power at the end for the 200m long 200m/s exit speed installation.
Spin the flywheel, and engage a clutch to connect it with a winch that pulls the sled via a (Dyneema) rope. There are magnetic clutches that provide precise control over the force, allowing it to run the glider/rope near their structural limits.
Rough, back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest viability of 25m long catapults that launch suitable freight at ~200m/s, but "suitable" here means ~100g, likely requiring fancy rigid foam fillers for the box and limiting to sufficiently solid freight.
If you figure out how to dig a 100~400m deep, 2~3m diameter hole cheaply, you could save massive horizontal space. Launching out of an elevator shaft of a highrise or on the wall of a tall building could be practical, too. Just drag a thin rope up behind the sled, and use it to pull the main rope back up. The sled should be far too light on it's own. Click/hook in the next glider, while getting the flywheel back up to speed. This should allow 10~20s spacing on a single sled/guide, and up to ~2s if you robot-mount the glider fast enough to the next sled on an array of parallel guide rails. As soon as one glider clears the launch space, the next one could be moved in. That'd be important to the economics of building / converting a tower for such a use case.
And even if the contents require long (and thus horizontal) catapults, it might be feasible to launch the empty glider from much smaller (50m vertical would also solve most clearance issues) facilities to use most of the range for actual delivery.
You would also need to limit this strategy to payloads that can withstand shock loads of multiple hundreds of G (soups and hard cheese, maybe even bread adequately packaged. may need a different method for floral deliveries).
Proof of concept shouldn't be too difficult, most of the tech already exists (Raytheon and Northop-Grumman have had a handle on it for decades). DHS might not be too amused, however.
You're thinking too small. I want my uber eats delivery to land directly on the plate in my cupboard before I even set it on the table. Please provide appropriate ballistic modelling for this thankyou
The issue is simply a matter of minimum required landing area. Hovering could be a little smaller than parachute delivery (16 ft), but still must have a "safe area" is approximately similar because the vehicle must hover without nearby obstructions.
Also, like a lot of solutions, this doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to be better than the alternatives, which Zipline appears to be in the places it is being used.
What is that thought based on? Have you studied this field in depth?
What makes you write that?
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/amazon...
All well and good as long as they're criminals... But there's nothing to ensure it's used for that. Imagine Uber God mode for all vehicles.
I don't think there were that many unintended consequences from this tech. We got better traffic jam maps. And maybe a handful of criminals who forgot to leave their phone at home got caught.
I think this is one of those things that people growing up with the tech won't think anything of it (mom wants to always know your location) but old geezers will reminisce of a time where we still had to call a landline and talk a friend's parents first to see if they are home.
Honestly the last time I saw a drone, the most annoying thing about it was its noise. I can't imagine them buzzing around all the time simply because of that.
They're also intended to do things like saving people's lives, not delivering their Amazon orders.
The reason the guy down the street is probably loud is he is flying a race drone and hitting very high RPMs with it.
It seems that due to frangibility concerns, Project Wing uses much smaller motors and props now which requires a higher RPM to beat the air into submission.
You might say _impact on others_ was one of the most important things they had to address with the FAA.
Delivery worked, but neighbors complained that the drones sounded like they were powered by the chained souls of the thousand hungry damned. They've apparently worked hard to get the sound down to a mere hundred hungry damned. ;)
Obviously IAMNL, YMMV, etc., but the legal system does care about degree of normalcy.
Ps: if someone can better fill in the details I'm sure these are commonly studied cases and that I've butchered the facts. Please correct me!
https://www.appgeo.com/maps-pointers/google-now-selling-aeri...
Since around 2011 Google has been flying its own missions to collect 6 inch (15 cm) pixel imagery across the entire United States... goal is to have nationwide imagery that is no older than three years old everywhere, and to have imagery that is no older than one year in the largest metropolitan regions in the USA
Eagleview and Nearmap are other companies doing the same thing.
Even though the photograph changed the intimacy and privacy of face to face interaction, and the electric streetlight made public spaces artificial and impersonal, these new technologies certainly did more good than harm.
We should embrace the good that will come from new technologies. I for one and looking forward to a future where my packages are delivered quickly and securely, and I'm willing to accept that as a side effect Google will have slightly better ads.
There are also obvious privacy issues - if such drones will ever allowed to become commonplace, some percentage of drones will probably look like Fedex, but would be operated by other actors.
I think, proper application of such drones could be emergency services. Perform emergency delivery, use drones to establish a temporary passage for an emergency vehicle, ...
Are you asking us to trust megacorps to not make maximum use of their surveillance data? When they've been caught time and again with the hand in the privacy cookie jar? When they turned the Internet into a 24/7 panopticon, with every web page carrying tens of surveillance beacons connected to the motherhive?
Compare to no route restrictions, where you would probably have the drones flying over people's back yards, which would be a considerable reduction in privacy.
No sane vendor will agree to these sort of terms and these companies do not care about privacy, they are all in the data mining and advertising business.
Unlike self-driving cars, self-flying drones do not have to worry about people running into their path, cars parked in the parking lane adjacent to their line suddenly opening a door into their line, or sharing the road with unpredictable human driven vehicles.
The drone route regulations will be starting with routes that have no other traffic except birds and insects. The routes can be designed so that there are different levels for north, south, east, and west travel, so except at the endpoints a drone never has to worry about encountering another drone moving in a different direction. It only has to deal with drones coming up from behind or coming up on drones ahead of it.
They also need to avoid obstacles that aren't on their digital maps, like newly erected cranes, and moving things like birds, parachutists and gliders.
Of course, you could argue they don't need to store the videos they take, or transfer them off the drone, other than a last-60-seconds-flight-recorder for crash investigation.
There are some other exceptions as well IIRC for gliders, ultra lights and some others.
Cameras are not being used for this job.
>They also need to avoid obstacles that aren't on their digital maps, like newly erected cranes, and moving things like birds, parachutists and gliders.
Cameras can be used for these, however it's better to use other sensors as the primary means of detection.
Certainly not in the near future, and probably not ever for delivery drones. Such systems would require unreasonable additional payload.
Everything a drone can see is in public, same as any other camera man, airplane, helicopter, or satellite.
I see drones as one of the potential solutions to last mile delivery, co-existing with other technologies.
So the sky is going to be littered with drones delivering packages in ten to 20 years? Present day that seems ridiculous and unattractive!
Cars also seem to have exerted a much greater impact in terms of getting cities to design themselves primarily around themselves (probably because of that popularity).
What problem is drone delivery actually solving? How often are people sitting at home and need a delivery dispatched right now. Food delivery seems to be the only compelling use case. Maybe the occasional "out of toilet paper" emergency?
Or perhaps on demand delivery becomes so easy that it changes people's behaviour to JIT all their shopping.
Depending on who you ask, driverless vehicles are either right around the corner, or 5-10 years away. Meanwhile, drone delivery is possible, right now, and the airspace above my house is generally empty. (It's being done "in prod" for medicine delivery in Rwanda. iirc those are not autonomous though.)
Like delivery options that exist now, I wouldn't expect drone delivery to be instantaneous either.
In a well-designed city noise sources would be under the ground or at a ground level, behind a sound barrier. They wouldn't be placed at altitude.
Perhaps like this - Life in the Spanish City that banned cars. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/sep/18/paradise-life...
This is about how much noise your aircraft are allowed to create. What you should be able to hear in the street are the tweeting of birds in the camellias, the tinkle of coffee spoons and the sound of human voices.
[1] https://io9.gizmodo.com/photos-from-the-days-when-thousands-...
Perhaps, but I imagine a decent chunk of these folks are in places like NYC, which probably won't see drone delivery from retail Walgreens stores. I wonder what percent of the population lives within 5 miles of a suburban Walgreens, which might conceivably be able to offer drone-based delivery.
How utterly depressing.
They must have changed for good reasons.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-12/canberra-delivery-dro...
For what it’s worth, at NASA the official term is (s)UAS, but we use that and UAV, drone, etc interchangeably has in day to day conversation. As long as it’s clear what you’re talking about, the exact word is really not that important.
You have your connotations backwards. You'll see no consumer drones marketed as UAVs, but plenty of military drones are called that.
> Maximum altitude of 400 feet above ground level (AGL) or, if higher than 400 feet AGL, remain within 400 feet of a structure.
You can also apply for a waiver.
As long as it is under 55 lbs. is counted as a sUAS under FAA regulations.