Alphabet’s Wing begins making commercial drone deliveries in the US | Hacker News Reader

Alphabet’s Wing begins making commercial drone deliveries in the US

techcrunch.com

254 pointsanon1m0us234 comments

Anyone else worried about the noise pollution that will result from widespread drone delivery services and “flying cars”? I’m thinking the pushback won’t happen until there’s enough penetration that wealthy interest groups will make it impossible to rollback. I can envision a future where we’re all just stuck with a loud constant hum from drones overhead.

Are they louder than delivery vans? I never heard one from close distance so I really don't know.

Yes. They sound like weed whackers.

Or like a huge swarm of bees flying overhead. That's what I thought it was when I first heard one of those--it turned out to be a drone flying only ~30 feet over our heads.

vuvuzelas You know, that annoying thing that ruined FIFA world cup matches?

Heresy!

I thought it was the corruption

They are comparable to cars driving on a highway, 75-80 decibels. Though that's small consumer drones.

Depending on the design, the delivery drones can be louder or quieter. We just don't know.

Cars driving on the highway are

a.) driving in a controlled designated area

b.) not near residential housing mostly but and more often than not, sound barrier walls are built in situations they are

the noise of a bunch of cars is also a much less annoying frequency than your typical drone, which is more of a buzz. I say this as a drone enthusiast myself; I only feel comfortable flying mine when other people aren't around.

> not near residential housing mostly

Maybe not in America but there are plenty of motorways in the UK that go right next to houses. For example:

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Port+Talbot/@51.5978766,...

That's obviously a pretty insane road to build (60s were a different time I guess!), so I guess this doesn't really invalidate your point.

Anyway I think the noise won't be too bad. How many drone based deliveries are people going to get? Maybe one a week on average? I can live with that.

If all my neighbours are getting one or two deliveries per week, there will be drones in the street all day.

https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6382467/wings-drones-... 69 decibels measured at 15m during delivery. Presumably it should be quieter during the flight since it can climb up to 120m

I'm more worried about having thousands of airborne google cameras flying about filming without peoples consent than the noise. Fossil trucks and cars are very noisy already.

Anybody is allowed filming in public (with minor restrictions on tunnels and bridges and government agency buildings in some areas), the courts have ruled on that many times. Plus they already have satellites photographing the whole planet daily.

I'm more worried about the drones breaking and falling on our heads.

Is the view of a garden from 20 meters up in the air considered "public filming"?

Can I fly a drone over the house of whomever I want and record all they're doing?

The law is not settled on how high you can fly above private property.

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=b9a60354-30c6...

But note, it's a different question from whether one can film your property from public space. I can fly a drone above the public street and film your property from the side. And it's legal.

I'm not really sure what your point was intended to be in your first paragraph.

"I'm worried about ubiquitous drone-enabled surveillance." "Well, it's legal."

I don't really see how that addresses any concern.

If we don't want it happening, we should make it illegal, simple as that.

That would be complicated. You'd have to make outdoor photography illegal.

arkades 1 hour ago [-]

I'm not really sure what your point was intended to be in your first paragraph. "I'm worried about ubiquitous drone-enabled surveillance." "Well, it's legal."

What part of that has anything to do with outdoor photography?

If taking photos/videos outside (on public property) is legal, then I can survey your property all day long from the streets that surround it.

It's very hard to make surveillance illegal without making photography/videography illegal.

Try and write out the law, if you think you can.

The FAA has wide latitude to regulate our skys, so there must be some gotchas to this hypothetical law that you're thinking of that aren't immediately obvious to me, so I'm curious where my blind spot is.

Eg. Video recording is prohibited from any Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), except by license from the FAA.

Said license would then include a requirement to get permission from the property owner.

It's one thing to put up a 9-ft tall fence surrounding your property to prevent passers by from taking photos as there are very few 10-ft tall people. It's another thing if 50-ft tall fences aren't enough.

> Eg. Video recording is prohibited from any Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), except by license from the FAA.

Congratulations, you've now banned storing debug information for when one of these drones inevitably crashes. Since I'm sure they'll be using cameras for collision avoidance...

So you just prohibited all video recording from drones, remote controlled planes, helicopters, air balloons. You know they are all used for creative and industrial purposes. No more bridge inspections by cheap drones, only by expensive manned helicopters. No more cool aerial scenes in the indie movies, only the rich can afford to hire a helicopter. No more observation balloons. Etc, etc, etc.

I’m more worried about Google pulling the same stunt they did with the Gmap cars and having thousands of airborne wifi enabled devices trying to get into every wireless network they can find and collecting data from it.

Well guys. Take your last relaxing walk outside. Because it's vuvuzela land from here on. Our children will never know how nice it was outside. The fact you could once hear birds singing and the wind blowing.

I dunno, our children may discover the joys of slingshots again. There'd be plenty of target practice for them.

It's not illegal to destroy someone's privacy but it is illegal to destroy someone's property. As odd as that is.

I wonder if there might be a loophole by which one could make all their private information classed as "trade secret" and then divulging any of it or snooping into any of it would be against the law.

Isn’t figuring this problem out what the FAA has been doing for the last five years? If we’re going to have public nuisance drones at the end of the day anyway, why they just let it happen earlier?

My understanding is that drones will operate sort of like power lines or a highway system; they will fly in straight lines on pre-approved routes and only deviate at last mile delivery. Hopefully they’ve thought of other measures as well.

Wing's trial here in Canberra has felt a little unremarkable. People don't really talk about it, apart from the occasional local news piece about someone complaining about the noise.

I'm quite interested to see how much people buy into it in the US. From a consumer point of view it seems they're directly competing with established services (eg. Uber Eats), and the main differentiator is a gimmick.

Many big things were ignored at first and many thought of them as just another fad: 1. internet 2. PC then Smart phone 3. digital camera 4. bitcoin ... the list is long.

continuous battery innovation and expanding flying range / lift power will make drone delivery a regular every day occurrence, just like uber service or amazon next day delivery service have become.

there are so many ideas and applications that are just waiting to be unleashed...!!! we live in truly amazing times!

Bitcoin still hasn't been disproven to be a fad :)

And it never will be :D. There was never any need for crypto currency to begin with and pretty much all of them fail to deliver on their core promise of decentralization. If they do deliver on that promise, they are so slow that the idea of global deployment is ridiculous...

The core idea of crypto currency (i.e. byzantine fault tolerance) is 2000 years old. The fact that this happens now already demonstrates that there never was any need for this and there won't be.

>There was never any need for crypto currency

Of course there was and still is. The three main purposes as I see them are as follows:

1) International money transfer free of regulatory oversight.

2) Anonymous purchase and money laundering

3) Decentralized currency free of government manipulation - Bitcoin falls short of this.

Cryptocurrency is a great solution for all of these needs. Of course I agree that most currencies add little or no value to their core product, especially the ICO crowd.

This is like that episode of the Simpsons when Apu is getting his citizenship and taking the quiz, they ask him the cause of the American Revolution and he starts going through a list with nuanced analysis. The testmaster stops him and tells him: "Just say slavery." There were some other very minor causes, but slavery was the biggest.

Similarly, you can just say illegal purchases. The other things have been largely debunked. Interestingly, you didn't even mention the giant primary use case of buying illegal things.

Er, wasn't the one-word cause of the American Revolution "taxation" ? (The one-word cause of the American Civil War would probably be "slavery", though).

> Er, wasn't the one-word cause of the American Revolution "taxation" ?

No, “disenfranchisement”. Read the Declaration, it was about usurpations of the right of the people to govern themselves. “No...without representation” is the key part, not “taxation”.

That's been inverted for propaganda purposes by modern anti-tax activists.

But, in a any case, “slavery” would have to be the Civil War, the Texas Revolution, or—indirectly, by way of the previous item—the Mexican-American War.

I think black market purchases fall pretty clearly under #2 above.

Oh wow. Did you just compare Bitcoin to the internet itself? Cameras too?! Please, get out of the crypto bubble.

" and the main differentiator is a gimmick.

My bet is that drones will be able to service these deliveries MUCH more quickly than humans. They're not in traffic. They can scale up with demand much more easily (much of the wait for Door Dash et al. is just getting someone available to make the delivery). Those advantages even get more pronounced with distance (up to whatever serviceable distance drones will have).

I'm very bullish on the idea of drone delivery. I'm hopeful that it will empower smaller businesses to compete with Amazon prime even, but that's probably a pipe dream.

I wonder if we’ll see independently-owned drones doing deliveries ala Amazon’s driver-partner contractors. I suppose it depends on how much drones cost in capital and how much liability there is to make it worth it for the big cos to distance themselves that way. Employment costs probably aren’t much of an issue.

Literally never. The FAA doesn’t mess around with this stuff. Do you think they’d trust your average Joe, who can’t even manage to keep the oil in his car changed every 10,000 miles, to maintain a 10+lb flying machine that could fall on a child or damage property? Conventional aircraft have strict maintenance and inspection intervals that require a decade of experience to work on.

Add to that that it contains lithium batteries so it can also catch fire in mid air and set property it falls on alight.

As opposed to petroleum?

You can build your own plane... in the usa it doesn't even have to be from a kit. They just have to pass engineering inspections and categories.

DoorDash service must vary on location. Where I live the biggest delay is not waiting for someone to accept the order but for the food to be made and for traffic on the way to your house. Usually I see dashers at restaurants waiting for food to be done.

You don't miss your sunset til it's droned

Who wakes up saying "gosh my life would be so much better if I could just buy things faster"?

Well, we’re talking about food delivery here. I’d order food much more often if it arrived quickly and thus was hotter when it got here.

And with no cares or worries that the noise would bug the hell out of your neighbors?

Come on... this is an awful idea.

Now would that be my neighbors who drive a dirtbike around their property for 6 hours a day, or the neighbors who tie their dog up outside at night and let it bark constantly at 2am?

Sounds like the broken windows theory in action.

Sounds racist man.

The dirtbike around their property neighbors.

Brick and mortar stores are going out of business left and right based on the market reality that people are more than willing to wait 2 days for their items if it's cheaper and is delivered to their door.

I think it's an extremely niche market, so I think it'll only be successful if you charge out the nose for the delivery.

They're going out of business because their inventory sucks. Every recession makes them suck more as MBAs optimize for lower quality and less selection.

You do not have kids, don't you?

I’d love to hear the connection explained.

I have kids, and this isn't a problem for me - not really sure what the children angle is here?

I live in a small rural town in Scotland, yet Amazon and others can deliver stuff to my door the next day. In big cities, some companies even offer same-day delivery.

Honestly, I don't need my stuff any quicker than that.

I'm sure there are some genuinely useful niche uses for drones - for example, there was a recent HN post about a company in Africa doing drone delivery of medical supplies to remote and inaccessible locations.

But I don't think it's a good idea to fill our skies with noisy, flying lithium batteries, just so you can get a pizza in 16 minutes instead of 18.

Do you own a blender? How often do you use it? Do you not think that the economic and environmental cost of producing that blender is too large, considering how rarely you use it? It literally sits unused 99.99% of the time. Talk about inefficiency!

If a drone service could deliver a blender in 5 minutes when you had blending to do, and take it away again when you're done, the blender could get much better utilisation by being shared with the entire town, at a lower economic and environmental cost.

The same probably applies to nearly everything in your house.

"Sharing economy but with drones" is a weird choice of hills to die on in 2019.

Good way of "disrupting" the blender/appliances market.

While you might have a point for some items, I think there are diminishing returns for most; I obviously don't have numbers, but it would seem to be highly inefficient to fly a blender around with a drone. Your 5-minute figure is also pretty unrealistic.

I could see how drone delivery might work for high value items, but they could just as easily be delivered in an EV van/truck carrying hundreds of items instead of just one. One genuinely useful case might be quickly flying blood/organs to a hospital.

There is also the human cost to consider; the noise of a single drone is very irritating, I can't imagine the horror of having our skies filled with the things.

I know of course you were generalising, but in my particular case, I actually do use my mini-blender quite often (for making curry pastes) :)

While cool in theory, I can't imagine the noise pollution and airspace traffic that would be generated by these drones.

It's the people who wake up saying "gosh my life would be so much better if I could just sell things faster", they're not really looking to improve your life, just the bottom line.

They are not in road traffic, they will create air traffic. Airspace management is a thing. Since at least 2010 there's been research around drone integration within airspace infrastructure management and I am bullish on software/hardware to keep all that traffic straight. Also bullish on new areas for insurance products...

With the right software, you could have a separation between drones of only a few feet. That would equate to trillions of drones flying simultaneously over just the USA and below 200feet.

Why not just fly them over roads? The network is already there to reach any residence and it's less noisy than a car. A crash would probably not hurt anyone, and assuming the crash rate is insignificant, they would probably reduce the overall incidence of traffic accidents, considering the likely reduced number of cars (the delivery services that will be displaced).

A crash won’t hurt anyone? Did you see the size of that drone in the article? Having that land on top of your car or MC could very well cause significant damage, I should think.

No worse than crashing into another car, I would think.

I know very little about automotive engineering, but I would suspect that cars are built to withstand impacts on the X-Y axis, not the Z-axis.

They are designed to not crush you if they roll over and I'm pretty sure that drone doesn't weigh more than a car.

The main risk I can see are if it comes straight at your windshield or you're on a motorcycle.

A crash would definitely cause a lot of damage, these drones are huge and think about what's on the road.

How high? Do these roads cross established instrument departure and approach routes? How do you ensure separation?

Right now when you get an IFR clearance the ATC system ensures you have separation from other aircraft. This needs to be accounted for somehow.

Until they can make them so quiet I don't hear them I'm going to work hard on regulating them so they cannot bug the hell out of me and cause damage with they malfunction.

Have you heard of cars? They make noise and cause damages too.

Maybe oblib is also trying to regulate cars.

I was beat to that action before I was born and in fact, by that time auto makers were advertising that their cars were were quiet. Luxury cars like Cadillacs were so quiet you couldn't even hear them running when standing outside right next to them and even quieter inside.

Try cutting off the "mufflers" on your car and see how far you get before getting pulled over a gifted a citation for it.

I looked into cars from your comment and it seems working hard toward regulation is the right approach.

Many cities regulate maximum vehicle noise levels.

It only impacts individual vehicle’s maximum ability, not counting the horns and other sound warnings.

It’s still a hell of a noise when you have intermitent traffic mixed with ponctual congestion.

As a European, everytime I'm in NYC the sound of horns and sirens is a non-stop nuisance — I personally enjoy the feeling for a few days because I don't live there, but I sympathise with actual New Yorkers who put up with this all year long. It's almost as bad as the garbage situation there.

IMHO, you guys need to put laws+fines in place to prevent the abusive use of horns (people literally use it even when they have to stop at a red light behind someone else...), and mandate that sirens only be used in real emergency situations. Big cities are so much nicer with less aggresive noises. Not to mention your liking automatic and hybrid cars makes traffic overall very silent by default.

New York is something of an exceptional case. Not that other cities are quiet, but the busy areas of New York take horns, sirens, etc. to the next level. Even someone generally used to urban living will find the general noise and congestion level exceptional. (By US standards. There are obviously other world cities that are very noisy and crowded as well.)

You can do a lot to mitigate road noise by physically blocking it. That’s not so easy with air traffic.

I don't know about you, but I don't want cars flying over my backyard either.

and if history any guide, you have good chances of succeeding for a time :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Acts

"The most draconian restrictions and speed limits were imposed by the 1865 act (the "Red Flag Act"), which required all road locomotives, which included automobiles, to travel at a maximum of 4 mph (6.4 km/h) in the country and 2 mph (3.2 km/h) in the city, as well as requiring a man carrying a red flag to walk in front of road vehicles hauling multiple wagons.

...

In addition to any concerns about the state of the roads, by the 1860s, there was concern that the widespread use of traction engines, such as road locomotives and agricultural engines, would endanger the safety of the public. It was feared that engines and their trailers might cause fatal accidents, scare horses, block narrow lanes, and disturb the locals by operating at night. Although all of these fears were justified and were soon realized, there was a gradual acceptance of the machines as they became more common in commerce."

Are deliveries right now being fulfilled by drones flying to a location being loaded up and then flown to the destination? Or are the good being sent to a central location and then dispatched?

> They can scale up with demand much more easily

Have you though about how many packages of the size and weight one of these drones can carry fit in the smallest delivery lorry? Judging from the video, I'd say one thousand is a good estimate. It means you need one thousand drone trips, both ways, to deliver what fits in a few square metres. How does this scale?

And then think of all those drones in pouring rain, or hail, or strong winds, or just at night in areas with vertical obstacles. It's just absurd.

They are not allowed to fly in the night and I guess they will avoid days with strong winds.

Drone deliveries may be significantly cheaper to the company.

Consumers already get "free" shipping, so they don't notice that.

But at some point, they'll see lower prices for products.

I'm really, really skeptical that if Amazon (or whoever) suddenly finds efficiencies through drone usage then those efficiencies and lower costs for them would translate into lower prices for consumers...

Unless both Amazon AND Walmart/Google/Uber/whoever ALSO find those same efficiencies, and compete...

Have you used it? From what I can tell, they are servicing areas remote enough that they may not even have Uber Eats. Even if they do, the time it takes for a car to navigate roads and reach you will be many times that of a drone that can fly over a hill and cover hundreds of metres of challenging terrain in about a minute.

I am sceptical about whether this has applications within a busy city (buildings become a problem and safety becomes a concern) but I think they're going to be perfect for areas a bit outside cities where deliveries don't exist or the quality of delivery service isn't so good.

At least in Canberra the area they are serving is not really remote. It’s actually quite hilarious that their “remote” area is the outer suburbs of Australia’s capital city (which is to be fair quite small)

Christiansburg, VA is the "slightly bigger town" next to Virginia Tech.

I also wonder how this will work in large cities. Packages to my condo are delivered to a non Amazon locker in our parking garage, my building doesn't have a spot where drones could even make deliveries safely. Residents lack roof access.

Packages left outdoors get stolen in a few minutes, which happens more often than not with Amazon's gig economy delivery drivers. They seem incapable of delivering packages to our locker, let alone a pile by the mailboxes. They're left outside the front door way too often.

Amazon's drivers probably could deliver to your locker if Amazon didn't relentlessly surveil and pressure them to do things as fast as possible.

To clarify: I don't fault the individuals. The flex driver program itself is broken. "Gig economy" seems to be a way to avoid minimum wage and employment laws.

The range is 6 miles. How remote could something 3 miles from a launch point be?

Am I missing something? Uber eats needs to pay a driver. Let's assume 20 minutes per delivery for a driver. At $15/hr your at $5 cost per delivery. Plus no need to tip a drone. Also, a drone could operate 24/7 so at 4 oclock in the morning if there was only one delivery in an hour it pays for itself. Plus the licensing happens at the federal level, so you don't have to deal with local laws.

The drones still have pilots monitoring them, so they're probably not going to run 24/7, and the pilots probably need training so they make more than $15/hr. But the license allows multiple drones per pilot so overall labor costs per delivery are lower.

> Plus the licensing happens at the federal level, so you don't have to deal with local laws.

That’s definitely not true, you very much have to deal with it at all levels of government, federal, state, county, city, etc.

The drone still needs a pilot. Someone certified will still need to do a preflight inspection to make sure there aren’t cracks in the prop, loose wiring, issues with the frame, that the batteries aren’t exhibiting any dangerous behavior (Puffed lithium cells), etc. Nothing in the mechanical world is perfect and you’re going to need some oversight of that.

Webcams in the drone bay with self diagnostics for internals, in the roof of a shopping center with fiber to a cheap control center a few msec away.

No idea why you are getting downvoted, automatic inspection is obviously where we are going.

If I hear a drone flying by my window at 4 in the morning (I live on the 8th floor in a very congested city) I’m 99% sure I’ll just open the window and try to take it down with any means possible (potatoes, socks filled with soap, whatever else is available). Even now I have to restrain myself not to throw tomatoes or eggs on top of motorcycle riders who do their own very noisy stuff at 2AM.

So justification for drones is, in order: "no need to pay a human"/"shifting assets from labor to capital", "customer can't pay a human either", "???" (human labor can operate 24/7 too) and "it's a way to work around local regulations" (i.e. wishes of the local citizens).

My lips mouth "antisocial", but I guess it's business thinking as usual.

They might plan to replace pilots with AI-based systems plus weak human supervision long-term. The idea is similar to what Waymo is working on for their AVs.

Relative to autonomous vehicles, this has less complications from other drivers, but more from wind, rain, gravity, possibly battery life, etc.

The areas coverable by AVs and autonomous drones could differ given their different challenges.

Asking because you are a city it has been trialed in, but how does it handle a multi-tenant house deliver? Like a two story unit block. Does it just drop it on the sidewalk? How do they handle busy sidewalks or parking lots?

So we have FedEx, Walgreens, and Wing (a.k.a. Alphabet, a.k.a. Google) all collaborating on this. Any of these huge companies could have run a pilot project by themselves and had a head start over the competition. I wonder why they joined up?

My theory #1 is that it's risk mitigation against inevitable public backlash. If and when something happens (drone crashes, a package falls, whatever) the media will be talking about the horrible thing that Google did, or whoever is the frontrunner in drone delivery. Just look at how critics gang up on Tesla when it comes to driverless cars. By combining forces, the media and critics cannot single out Google because it's FedEx and Walgreens and Google; it's everybody doing it.

My more mundane theory #2 is that Wing got the federal certification first, so FedEx and Walgreens paid Wing to be involved for fear of missing out.

Theory #3: It helps with lobbying the more partners you have. Lobbying at state or federal level I think will be super essential otherwise every city will be creating their own set of regulations and some may try to ban drone delivery.

Commercial joint ventures are common and often occur for prosaic reasons like "we think we'll make more money this way".

The more normal reason is that each cares about different parts.

Walgreens has something they need to deliver, and wants to be seen as innovative, but doesn't really want to do tech.

FedEx wants to improve delivery options, cares about end users and doesn't really care about tech.

Alphabet cares about technology, but doesn't really want to deal with end users.

Designing + building drones and airspace software aren’t in FexEx and Walgreens core business competencies.

Wing has been working on this for many years, which makes them a good partner.

I think the answer is simpler: they could not have run a pilot project by themselves.

Logistics are complex businesses. Google does not have warehouses in enough places to cover an interesting area. FedEx has. And drone deliveries are going to be expensive and only for lightweight items first. That means medicine makes sense. Walgreens will bring the clients.

And no, making reliable transport drones and the infrastructure to load them up, get a reliable GPS coordinate from your client, identifying drop-in zones is not easily done, and that's the value Google brings.

I would love to see the iterations that led to that final design, because there's almost nothing conventional about it. I know they spent a surprising amount of time just on the hook.

https://www.wired.com/story/wing-alphabet-x-drone-engineerin...

The hook was what I remembered the most from their video 5 years ago though!

https://youtu.be/cRTNvWcx9Oo?t=67

That's a great point. If you look at it, it makes sense because it's much easier to load balance packages that might have off-center mass when you have linear rails with multiple propellers like that, and for forward speed and longevity the wings make sense, but... what else did they try first? I feel like there must have been a dozen steps from quadcopter to osprey-like VTOL to gyrocopter to this.

I work in electric aviation, and we're looking at similar hybrid fixed/vtol/distributed designs. You need the VTOL for most practical drone applications including delivery, but you need fixed-wing linear flight for range. It's better to use many small fans for the VTOL part for reliability and stability, and it's more trouble that it's worth to try and re-use the same thrust units for hover and for forward flight (the design points are completely different). The main clever thing that strikes me about this design is the twin boom, which minimizes drag in forward flight and is very frugal with support structure for the lift fans.

On the other hand, this drone doesn't look production-ready to me. Too many exposed wires and servos. I don't rate its chances in a good downpour.

Any idea why the right tail is a different shape? Is that an antenna sticking out? Why the bulbous white part?

I believe that's a Pitot tube. It's to determine the airspeed of the drone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitot_tube

That Wired article is from 07/15/2018.

Definitely not production ready. It's got exposed PCBs on the side of the boom. Probably the engine drivers.

>and it's more trouble that it's worth to try and re-use the same thrust units for hover and for forward flight (the design points are completely different).

Do you know why the Osprey designers went for tilt-rotor? Would it be easier or harder to do something like that at drone delivery scale with electric motors?

Am I missing something or does that article about a hook not include a picture of said hook?

Related topic... Drones delivering blood in Rwanda -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnoUBfLxZz0

I can see specialised sectors where this will, like emergency / rapid medical supply delivery.

More difficult to see a regular urban / suburban application working.

While I'm always excited by reading these articles, my mind always goes back to the boring problems like privacy and noise.

I have no idea how loud these things are but I suspect that they would be less noisy than a typical UPS/Fedex truck.

If I'm in range of an EV drone, it's very likely I'm in range of an EV truck. The truck doesn't have to hover. So I would suspect the opposite - perhaps even compared to an idling diesel truck - because drone props tend to sit right in the really irritating whining spot of the spectrum.

I can sleep with an idling Diesel engine quite close, even in the vehicle.

Don’t reckon I could sleep with a drone hovering above my house.

A drone whine is high(er) pitched, so it doesn't go through closed windows and doors nearly as much, and the noise is a relatively short range and not supersonic like a helicopter rotor. Diesel truck rumble is low pitched and pretty much goes through everything, closed or not.

And the human perception of higher pitched noises is that they're much more noticeable and much more obnoxious. And when the kid across the street is flying his drone, I can hear it in my living room through my double-paned window. I'd much rather hear the FedEx truck idling than that fucking thing whizzing around - and it's hundreds of feet away!

They fly high enough that the noise is barely above background levels.

That's doubtful. I can hear drones buzzing when they're over 500 feet away, and they're loud enough to be annoying (and those aren't carrying payloads so they are significantly lighter). Are they really using hundreds of feet of cable to drop the packages?

I think this varies significantly depending on drone design. You absolutely can make them quieter, you just have to compromise elsewhere -- for example, using larger props.

This is a large drone to begin with, so that shouldn't be an issue. It's also got wings, so it shouldn't need to spin its engines at full except when it's hovering for a delivery.

I agree with some of what you said, but this is likely to weigh at least 10x as much as the drones I'm talking about when you include a payload of even a few pounds. There is another comment on here from someone in the trial city talking about how the residents complain about the noise. You can't beat physics.

I was worried about this too. I recently got a newest gen DJI drone, and was self conscious about flying it for this very reason.

Turns out, with the quiet propellers installed it disappears into the urban background hum when it's 30m up in the air. I've also flown it in uninhabited wilderness (national park, two days hike to nearest anything) and even there it's about 80-100.

Add any horizontal distance and you will find it very hard to locate the drone after looking down at the controller (at least until you get better at flying it and develop better spatial awareness).

there are simple solutions for minimizing drone noise :)

Sadly, shotguns within city limits must remain secure inside your vehicle...trying to figure out a more legal and safer way.

Probably not legal but definitely safer:

http://jammers4u.com/drones-jammer

I would like to see some independent measurements of the noise levels throughout the entire proposed flight envelope.

(assuming worst case in terms of noise output below)

I can't imagine this is going to be something that people will be willing to tolerate if it occurs asynchronously throughout the day. I can handle the UPS/Fedex trucks going around once a day. The garbage trucks twice a week at a fairly specific time each morning. But a drone showing up at any arbitrary point of the day based on when someone placed an order? I don't think I could handle this.

This could’ve been written when first cars appeared too. Nobody will focus on drones when they are common, same as nobody focuses on cars driving by. There are techniques to reduce noise by special wing design or making larger rotors (similar to how a larger fan in the computer is quieter) or even redirecting noise upwards (https://dronebelow.com/2018/11/06/dotterel-technologies-rais...).

People are focusing on cars though, and many are looking forward to electric cars because they're less noisy.

Just because the noise battle was lost against cars at least temporarily doesn't mean people don't care.

Or that "people can't learn from mistakes"

Wife and I were sitting in the car, windows down, eating chinese takeout on Bridgeway in Sausalito....dinner with a view, and a movie of quiet walking tourists speaking various languages as they pointed up at the precarious homes on the steep hills. Blissful dinner and strolls were rudely interrupted by a drone following a slow-moving car...everyone was startled, all attention on the drone as it crept along the road. Wife and I concluded in felt completely invasive. NOT looking forward to drones.

And the issue of cheap commercial off the shelf hardware being able to deliver a 1.5kg bomb or a gun anywhere within 10km with pinpoint accuracy also strikes me when I ses these. With a good camera and some image recognition, autonomous assasins arent sci-fi any more. It’s economically and technically within reach not just for non-state actors but individuals now. That has got to have some implications.

Once drones really take off, I'm concerned about their impact on birds, bats and other aerial animals. Will we see bird hits left, right and centre? Will these corporations petition to "cleanse" their airspace of all birds and bees so that their drones don't take a hit? Nobody seems to have thought of this angle...

Birds get out of the way of slow-moving aircraft that make a lot of noise.

So long as drones are reasonably slow (bird-like speed) birds will get out of the way. Now, animals might be stressed or displaced by this which could be a bad “impact”. But I doubt they’ll be falling out of the sky. You don’t see many birds colliding with bigger/faster birds.

  birds will get out of the way

Windmills are completely stationary, yet birds collide with them all the time.

When the windmills are stationary (the blades that is), birds very rarely collide with them. When the blades do move, they are often a lot faster than these drones (120-180mph is not uncommon).

"Dr. Shawn Smallwood’s 2004 study, spanning four years, estimated that California’s Altamont Pass wind “farm” killed an average of 116 Golden Eagles annually... Smallwood also estimated that Altamont killed an average of 300 red-tailed hawks, 333 American kestrels and 380 burrowing owls annually – plus even more non-raptors, including 2,526 rock doves and 2,557 western meadowlarks"

http://savetheeaglesinternational.org/new/us-windfarms-kill-...

"With regard to bird fatalities, it says: "Wind turbines represent an insignificant fraction of the total number of bird deaths caused by man-made objects or activities (eg building structures, transmission lines, and keeping domestic cats)." According to the CSE, for every bird killed by a turbine, 5,820, on average, are killed striking buildings, typically glass windows."

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/feb/27/wind-ene...

How big is that farm to cover the territories of that many eagles? On first glance that looks like an amazing claim.

Almost 5,000 turbines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altamont_Pass_wind_farm

From a bird's perspective, windmills move in novel and unpredictable ways. Birds have not evolved to be concerned with gigantic, sword like objects swinging perpendicular to the plane if flight.

Drones move like birds.

I have experience with flying small airplanes, and their windshields got pretty icky with bugs pretty quickly. These days I have a motorcycle, and after 2 hours on the highway or 1 hour in natural undeveloped areas your helmet gets completely covered by bugs.

On the other hand, bird strikes are relatively uncommon, and drones are tiny so the risk is even lower for them. So it might not be that big of an issue.

But they would be great at exterminating bugs.

https://youtu.be/FX3uOQiZs0A

Birds attack drones, especially large birds of prey

This video is exactly two years old, the drone looked the same: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_zoJfkElmw

What are the rules if a drone crashes in my garden. Is it mine? Do I have to spend time and energy giving it back?

By 2030, if GoogMazon's drone incidental landing feature is implemented, you will be required to put it into your house and rate it 5/5, lest your capital credit score is demoted for disrespecting our corporate overlord.

Alphabet wing needs to be at the forefront for creating policy that's serves both customers and businesses yet still avoids the swarm of nuisance, noise pollution, privacy violation, and operational failure. The only way to avoid public backlash.

Required are

1. Established routes

2. Operational failure protocols

3. Limits in Distance veering from established routes for deliveries

4. Collision avoidance

5. Noise to height ratio

6. Minimum and maximum speed requirements

7. Capability limits e.g. Video, audio, recording, delivery.

8. Color codes

9... What else.

(inspired by hn comments)

It will be interesting to see the implementation of three dimensional drone traffic.

Who is working on the drone path guidelines, and traffic control policies?

Uber and NASA are working on this.

Airbus has a strong team working on this. https://www.airbusutm.com/

Here’s the airspace management talk we gave at the last Uber Elevate Summit, which gets into some 3D topics.

https://youtu.be/ojkK5zI2VO8

I feel like automated flight could always avoid incident by detecting all objects (at the same elevation) within $x feet, and if the object is north of you, move up $y feet, and if it’s south, move down $y feet, unless another object is above/below you, in which case veer $z degrees clockwise and continue travel until you can change elevation?

For aircraft to aircraft there’s a automatic advisory which coordinates this between aircraft.

https://www.skybrary.aero/index.php/Airborne_Collision_Avoid...

I’ve heard some Airbus have it tied into their auto pilot too.

When all else fails, the rule is “turn right”.

Cool, yeah, seems pretty straight-forward?

I think we may never have fully self-driving cars because fully self-flying cars is so much easier, and better! It just needs to get quieter.

NASA and the FAA are collaborating with the industry leaders on this. It's under the umbrella of UTM (Unmanned Traffic Management).

Here's Wing's blog on it: https://medium.com/wing-aviation/wing-demonstrates-decentral...

Drone deliveries is one of those ideas that look simple and always almost within reach, but the more people try them the more they reveal their complexity.

I wonder why hasn't any company just proposed or built a network of pipes in which autonomous pods can zip around to deliver goods. Doesn't seem too expensive- the pipes don't even need to be interred outside cities and they don't need to be huge- just enough to deliver grocery-sized stuff. Seems immediately feasible and with a load capacity that air deliveries will never support.

Iirc this was a thing in turn of century london

Actually... they have built such a system! It’s long gone now, but some major cities used to have a mail delivery system built on underground pneumatic tubes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube_mail_in_New_Y...

Do you know what killed it?

The electricity-based message transmission systems (telegrams, fax, email, etc)

Discussed in the wiki: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube_mail_in_New_Y...

Victorian London had the London Pneumatic Despatch Railway for the Post Office.

https://www.newstatesman.com/future-proof/2013/12/londons-vi...

Edit: Oh, and many large late Victorian shops and offices had pneumatic tube systems for passing money away from the shop floor, or exchanging messages. They're still made:

https://www.aerocom.co.uk/air-tubes

Costco still has these for moving money from their registers. Banks also for drive up teller services.

The plot of the excellent heist movie Logan Lucky involves some of these tubes.

Of course, I know of the Victorian pneumatic tubes. But with today's technology would be very different: the pods would be electric and autonomous, and the pipes would be nothing else than enclosed rails. The routing would be performed by the pod itself in communication with the pipe, and the pods could use radar to avoid bumping into each other.

It would be a rather simple system, really: a closed pipe with a rough guide, with sensors and data exchange points every now and then and at junctions. The pods would not have to be very fast: 60km/h would be already a fantastic speed inside cities when the only stops are start and destination point. The pipes can be taken to individual buildings (shops, offices, houses), but there could also be public delivery and shipping points on each street/ block. The standard (small) size and shape of the pods (or of their internal container) means that they can be easily manipulated automatically: for example, collected and shipped on different transportation systems such as trucks or rails to reach distant or unconnected destinations, then reintroduced into the pipes system.

Elon, where are you? :)

We now live in a world with little capital constraints afforded to some entities. After a successful... pilot these drones could be rolled out as fast as the electric scooters appeared (barring local/state regs). Competition for the last-mile skies may become fierce as investors flock to own a piece of a brand new category. While I don't think it prudent to 'fly fast and break things' I can't help but think its inevitable that scale will happen quickly- and drone insurance along with it.

It’s not about capital constraints, the issue is with regulatory constraints. As long as there is a 0.01% chance of an unmanned drone losing control and flying into the engine of an airliner on final approach, it will be heavily restricted.

High frequency noise pollution until they fly like owls.

I have my reservations about drone deliveries. But if they are proven to be reliable and somewhat cost-effective, I would pay a 10-15%+ premium to get my groceries delivered by airdrop. What's more valuable, your time or your money?

What's wrong with a grocery van dropping them off?

Drones can work all hours.

It would be nice if a drone could make deliveries to a spot in my backyard. There are too many packages being stolen from people’s front porch in my neighborhood.

Calling it now: thieves will use cheap drones of their own to steal your packages with minimal risk to getting caught.

Or just shoot down the delivery drones

I'm very sure the drones would have cameras to catch the culprits. You wouldn't want to destroy property owned by a $800B corporation.

The strength of that defense depends on whether the cameras are streaming live feeds to a remote server, or just storing it locally.

A complete camera and RF transmitter is only a few grams in weight and negligible in power draw. (I fly a tinyHawk which is 42g including the drone, camera, RF stuff, flight controller, frame, motors, props AND battery) I can't see them NOT having real-time camera feeds, especially since they have actual pilots in control of them.

This is hilarious. I can't wait to see drones duking it out over some idiot's burrito

With police drones in pursuit of the thieving drones making off with stolen goods.

My roof would be ideal!

The only ones that get to make that trade off are the ones with money :p

We don’t have amazon so I’m not used to this extreme hurry this seems to be targeting. If I order something I usually go pick it up at the shop on the corner after 48-72h. In rare cases the day after or even delivery to my door (I prefer pickup tbh). I thought same-day or next-day delivery was already widespread in e.g the US. Is this a push to shorten delivery even more? Hours?

Amazon Prime Now (select locations only) already has delivery within a couple hours. This is about reducing costs of such services.

Are people willing to pay for it? How much? I’d probably rather go for 5% cheaper and delivery within 48h, for example. Is there a big market for “stuff, now”? I realize once you get used to it, you get used to it. I used to live in a smaller town where normal delivery was a week, now I live in a big city and can usually get 1-2 days and I can imagine how I’d feel if I had to go back to a week.

1hr delivery is $10ish, 2hr is $5ish. It depends on what you order.

Edit: To clarify, most people don't use this most of the time, because most of the time 24-48hour delivery is fine. That said, it is VERY convenient when you realize you need X today and cannot wait. Even with the shipping fee, an Amazon basics cables is often cheaper than a trip to Best Buy.

Yeah I think one of the reasons I don’t quite see the appeal is the lack of an Amazon (or equivalent). There is just no place that has everything and probably also has it cheaply. A cheap cable I’d need to chase online for an hour and then probably register at the obscure web shop where it was cheapest. It’s a hassle, but also I kind of enjoy the lack of the shopping monoculture Amazon brings.

Main use case I have is food delivery which I use quite often and i obviously want while it is still warm. A quick Google search suggests that alone is a 83 billion dollar market [0]. Granted, they'll probably need to scale this up to handle larger food orders as the Australia demo only delivered 1 burrito at a time as far as I know of.

[0]: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

The goal is probably using drones for delivery where there are no roads.

My guess is the existing delivery infrastructure in most of the US is too effective to allow drones to succeed here (yet). Someday that will change, but I expect drone delivery to grow fastest where roads and other distribution infrastructure aren’t available (which may include remote areas of the US). Once the tech is proven, it’ll return to displace incumbent tech.

Imho, the interest is less about convenience, and more about reducing employment (fedex/amazon’s interest), combined with alphabet doing its reflexive moonshot thing. There isn’t a huge consumer demand for drones; like google glass, I expect that they will be taken aback at how negative the reaction is.

The article says that they actually only did exactly one delivery. And they don't mention any specific details about more deliveries.

Trust TC to put a 9MB file in their articles, ublock is quick to deny it

Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21295652

buzzing to a house near you!

How would this ever compete with land-based delivery? What are the numbers?

I have no numbers but if executed properly it should reduce the number of people required in the total delivery process and it should in faster delivery.

I don't think it's really meant to compete directly to start with. This is a technology PoC that will be initially be used to deliver small, "I need it now" packages to locations that are easily air-accessible but might be a pain to get to via driving. In the future it's likely this will be a complement to normal ground-based delivery for heavier packages and packages in high-density areas, probably with a "mothership" ground vehicle or small local warehouse as a base of operations.

> locations that are easily air-accessible but might be a pain to get to via driving

Also known as everywhere in a city

Yes, fun fact: not everyone lives in a city.

But an inner city context is exactly the worst for drone delivery. Where do they drop it safely? How do they navigate to that low an elevation around high rises, awnings, trees, overhead wires, etc.? How do they avoid pilferage or outright theft? Animal damage?

Why are companies so intent on turning this planet into an auditory hell hole?

I know happy people consume less than unhappy people, but it's probably just not giving a fuck about the negative externalities and having long since captured any public body that would interfere on behalf of sanity.

Alphabet is claiming the sound is significantly lower in their drones than typical ones.

I'm curious how this works in practice because this is the type of thing that quickly gets legislative push back from municipal governments.

I'm also curious if drones can fly higher than usual or would that endanger planes...

Sorry what? This will be much quieter than roads and gas truck by like 100x?

Good thing a truck can carry >100x as much stuff.

In an ideal situation. Reality is much simpler.

Do you feel the same way about cars that are much bigger and consume more fossil fuels?

Wing had to get approval from the FAA and the city to operate and noise level is regulated.

I would be skeptical that an electric mail truck on a route is less fuel efficient than a hundred drone trips back and forth.

It seems pretty improbable to me too. Is anyone aware of any numbers published by Wing or other drone delivery companies?

Doesn't work though for things like hot freshly made food.

>Why are companies so intent on turning this planet into an auditory hell hole?

Their leaders are looking for ways to get off the planet or secure themselves in fallout shelters in New Zealand, while their companies fuel rampant consumerism through data capture, the employment of the world's best behavioural economists/psychologists and marketing leading to pollution, grand destruction of our ecosystem and inequality.

Makes you think.

While it's yet to be bourne out, I do have to agree with others in hoping this will actually be quieter overall than cars and trucks. The footprint can be much smaller as well. They don't need huge road capacity and all the construction that goes with it.

But we will see I suppose. Maybe a few hundred drones canvasing the sky above a busy city will be a horrible sound. I hate hearing drones in nature but must admit they tend to get pretty easy to ignore once off the ground and cruising.

A pilot program to have pilot-free vehicles piloted by pilots

Is it illegal to shoot these down and take their contents?

IANAL, but it is already illegal to:

- Shoot guns within city limits

- Damage property

- Steal

A more grey area might be what you're obligated to do if it lands/crashes in your back yard.

Yeah I should have been more specific.

1. Shoot down with a potato canon as it flies over your land.

2. Take items that are now in your backyard.

You just named two things that are already illegal. Why would there need to be a new law?

To make it legal.

How much cost/effort would it be to string up safety nets in urban areas for drones? My biggest concern with drones is that they fail, and that means they're landing on someone's head. If a city invested in nets, maybe 100ft above the ground, I imagine you could have a much less anxious civilian population with drones flying overhead. Someone tell me why this is a silly idea.

Birds

Cool these can be shot down ... skeeting shooting now drone shooting/treasure hunting.

Also, so the sky is going to be littered with drones delivering packages from cold syrup to condoms? Further, aren't these things noisy?

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