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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

This is just to deal with the current surge. They'll be back, with drones.

There is a joke saying that the local state owned post will surely quickly overtake Amazon at drone usage as the small "you were not at home, go at post office for the package" leaflets are much lighter than the actual packages, so each drone can easily distribute a lot of them. ;-)

Stop giving bureaucracies evil ideas to torture us and waste even more of our time. ;@)

In the future, I want a drone with a replicator to land and make the shipment of products right in front of me. :-P

Artisinal, drone replicated items you say?

In the future, I want a drone with a replicator to land and make a replicator right in front of me. ;)

Will drones as a delivery method to customers be viable within the foreseeable future? I just don't see how the economics work out. Even if you ignore all the unsolved software, logistical and legal (zoning) hurdles, seems to me like the ongoing security and maintenance costs of a drone fleet would be prohibitively expensive for a long time.

Some economists studied this[1] and found that even if you assume incredibly expensive drones and a rather small, spread-out city (Chattanooga TN), drones are signifacantly cheaper than delivery trucks. This is true even if delivery trucks cost $0 to purchase. Most of the cost of delivery is labor & maintenance, not upfront capital costs.

The main reason we don't have drones deliver things is because the FAA bans it. No state or municipality can override the FAA, so we're all stuck until the feds change the law.

1. https://libjournals.mtsu.edu/index.php/jfee/article/download...

I think this study jumps to many unsubstantiated conclusions in their estimates.

> We assume that operating costs for personnel, loading, and monitoring will be approximately the same per package for truck as for drone delivery.

but at least they included

> There are additional drone costs such as: setting-up and running the drone delivery stations, the investment in research and development, and lobbying the FAA. Other costs include: buildings and land associated with the drone stations, computers and monitoring software systems for drone flights, computer technicians and drone monitors on site, robotics engineers for maintenance and upgrades to drones on site, utility costs of running the building, logistics management team to oversee operations, potential insurance and legal fees associated with drones, and potential air and/or radio frequency rights for drones, etc. There is also the potential for legal costs in some of the following situations: drones are found operating in unauthorized airspace, drones are shot down by civilians, a drone lands in an unauthorized space, etc

There's also mention that the drones can only deliver up to 5lb packages.

Also, I prefer my packages delivered to my door on the porch, not the middle of the yard.

Nothing stopping a drone from delivering a package to your porch.

My porch roof and rail and that huge ass rhododendron do. I'd have trouble landing a drone there myself without a 1" box attached

For durable packages there's no technical reason the drone can't sling it between the roof and rail and it's not like delivery drivers don't routinely lob small packages not marked as fragile. Considering how fun to test that one would be I doubt the team responsible is gonna let that feature request ticket sit around collecting Jira dust for long.

Oh theres lots of things stopping a drone delivering a package to my porch, including but not limited to me, I dont want Amazon's drone blowing junk all over the place on my front porch, messing up door decorations, flower pots, whatever it is. Getting caught on a branch, a gust of wind blowing it into a column and causing property damage, my dog grabbing it (my dogs catch birds in the yard, they will certainly hunt this thing). I know the ideal scenario from drone delivery is magical but reality is had, same with autonomous vehicles.

I don't have a yard and I share my porch with other people.

That's a big reason why the hand-wavy stuff is nonsense. The limitless number of exceptions will add a ton of cost, and instead of grunts in trucks you'll need an army of analysts and developers.

What a joke of a paper. I could poke a million holes in their assumptions, not to mention their ridiculously simplistic and completely erroneous cost model. There is no way either of them have more than a breath's worth of experience in parcel logistics.

Does this include the externality of drones being way too loud to use frequently in a residential area?

If we're including externalities- how about all of the traffic, noise, and pollution associated with driving delivery vehicles all day long

A drone is way more loud than the various electric delivery vehicles used in Netherlands. Aside from how loud a drone/quad copter is, the noise is also high pitches (more annoying). Traffic is/can also regulated somewhat by limiting the hours that these can operate (at least in NL; though that's usually to businesses). Some of the delivery vehicles have an optimized design, minimizing the space they take (e.g. the ones used for an online supermarket called Picnic).

Aside from electric vehicles some companies (DHL, Coolblue) also use electric bikes.

Yes AMZN is currently working on building them, I know people who are working on the prototype hardware at one of their contractors. Expect the coronavirus pandemic to only update AMZN timeline. Both drones and cashier-less grocery stores will become a thing in the next 5-10 years. This means UPS/FEDEX/USPS don't have to pay workers, and more importantly have to pay much less benefits.

Zipline is doing it now for medical supplies (even for things like COVID-19-related PPE) every day and night in Rwanda, Ghanda, and expanding to India and the Philippines (with test operations in the US).

https://twitter.com/zipline/status/1245333880930029570

They have been solving these problems operationally for years now.

> They have been solving these problems operationally for years now.

Emergency medical supplies (the twitter mentions "Lifesaving deliveries by drone") is quite different than delivering packages. That you can get something up and running for lifesaving stuff is one thing. Doing the same for my 0.50 EUR AliExpress package is different though, I'm not going to be home. If it's lifesaving I'd imagine you need it asap and someone will ensure that they'll be waiting for the package.

There’s an active drone delivery service operating in the New River Valley in southwest Virginia. It’s called Wing, and you can order baked goods and coffee today.

https://www.roanoke.com/news/nrv/wing-expands-drone-delivery...

It will be drones owned by people, similar to kindles or echos. There is no fleet, no (or very few) drones shot down or stolen.

Every family will have a drone “pet” with sole purpose if delivering Amazon stuff, in this case literally.

Drones were supposed to happen years ago. If they weren’t happening now they’re not going to happen as soon as the pandemic ends.

What is the holdup with delivery drones? Do they not work? Are they too loud? Legal issues?

Probably too loud and legal issues. Flying drones above trivial weights at low altitude is very illegal pretty much everywhere, in ways that are slow to change.

For good reason too. I'm sure there are many tens of thousands packages delivered in a decent sized city every day. With thousands of drones overhead the noise would be significant and even rare failures will occur regularly, crashing tens of kilos down on houses and people.

Even if they do work, they aren't too loud, and there aren't any legal issues... are they really worth it? Do they make any sense?

I personally think the problems that autonomous delivery suffers from are the same that regular human drivers suffer from. You need a dedicated locker for packages. If you can place it near parking lots then you can double or triple the efficiency of a driver. Just think of all the packages that couldn't be delivered because nobody was at home or simply the act of walking toward the door. That is a lot of wasted time.

Work is still happening on them, at least as recently as last fall. A co-worker headed back to Amazon to go work on that team.

You have any idea how difficult it is to fly drones in some automated fashion in an urban environment? That's an NP hard problem not solved until we have general AI.

Why do they have to use it in urban environments? Huge numbers of people in the USA live in a suburb.

Urban areas are already pretty well optimized by the traditional system. Urban population density makes good use of a delivery van's cargo capacity. Drone deliveries would make more sense in suburban or rural situations, where a drone can be more efficient than a whole delivery van traveling somewhere to deliver a single package.

If drone delivery doesn't work in a metro the size of Los Angeles or Cincinnati, then it doesn't work anywhere.

It can take the Telsa approach and record millions of hours of manual "highway in the sky" trips. Then compile and go from there.

Self driving cars are a much more difficult proposition and we can already do that pretty well. Flying where there is significantly less traffic and less obstacles and a third dimension to use? That makes things very easy.

Piloting the drones isn't the problem- the problem is logistics, noise, regulation, costs, etc.

All of the above and more. Cost too much, don't work in most areas.

Currently, all three.

Rolling autonomous robots may make sense, but flying stuff around has always seemed pointless.

There's just no reason to waste the energy, the coordination effort or take on the risk.

No traffic and direct paths?

Yeah, but there are big problems to solve that potentially offset those two benefits.

Legality: how high above your property do you own? Would a drone flying at 50 feet be trespassing? 100? 200?

Loss: how do you recover a crashed drone? Or one intentionally downed?

Range: how much power can you pack onboard without compromising payload capacity?

Payload capacity: how much can you reasonably lift?

Cost: dollar for dollar, is it more cost effective than trucks (even robotic ones)?

And so on.

Probably. I don't necessarily believe it's around the corner or ever will be feasible. But the motivation is clear.

Another factor could be weather conditions. Heavy rain/snow/wind could all affect range or even accuracy (heavy precip can interfere with GPS to some degree). Drones also probably work better in a suburban environ, but less in a dense urban area or less dense rural area. Also, maps can be terribly slow to update. My home is in a Chicago suburb, about 8 years old now. Google maps still cannot accurately plot my address. Personally, I dont look forward to "we dropped off your package where we think your address is" and yet the package is a few hundred yards away. I'm also reminded of one of my favorite fuckups, this by USPS: my Mom misquote "street" instead of "drive" on my address, street number, name, city, state and zip otherwise being correct, and the overnight package landed in Florida instead of Illinois...

You forgot the most important thing - noise.

Drones are loud. Incredibly loud.

Excellent point

I expect the delivery fleet of the future to look like an Amazon Locker on a self-driving e-bike trailer frame. You get a ping when your package is on your block, and use your phone to open your locker.

And when you’re not home?

The relevant locker pops open and yeets your package into the neighbor's dog.

If costs get low enough, it might be possible to do multiple delivery attempts per day. Something like "your delivery device will be on your block at 7:00, 9:00, 12:00, 3:00, 6:00 and 8:00".

Or, more optimally, you would configure delivery windows and tell it when someone will be available and they schedule one or two delivery times in that window.

If you are downtown at the pub, I expect it could ask you if prefer the delivery there.

Unfortunately VCs were much less interested in funding R&D of rolling autonomous robots in the past few years, so they aren't going to happen all of a sudden when the world actually needs them.

I do agree though that they make a lot more sense than drones, for several reasons: (a) power consumption / mileage per charge (b) carrying capacity (c) safety in populated areas (d) privacy when flying by buildings (e) lack of suitable landing areas in urban centers (f) noise in residential areas.

Source: I am the co-founder of one and aware of internals of several others

Safety I wonder. If they are only carrying 5lb packages having them fall from the sky sound bad but the frequency of rolling robots causing car accidents or running over people or getting smashed by locals might make it more safe.

Car accidents typically involve a car running into a robot, which might obliterate the robot but would seldom cause injuries to the driver. Delivery robots would almost exclusively operate on sidewalks of 25 mph, maybe 35mph roads. Running into someone is also unlikely to cause serious injury if the robot is kept to a reasonable size and weight limit. Obstacle avoidance and bump sensors are trivial to implement. Drones, on the other hand, can take out eyes and cause severe injury if they impact someone in the face with spinning blades, and crash avoidance mid-air involves an advanced control loop as opposed to just cutting power to motors.

https://www.citylab.com/perspective/2019/11/autonomous-techn...

Putting robots directly where people are creates way more unknowns than having them operate outside of the normal human space.

Well, I agree. The idea of a UAV with a 2m wingspan landing somewhere near my house to deliver a 5kg package sounds like it could cause a lot of injuries. The delivery vehicle has to be much larger than the package and it has to land near a spot that is accessible to humans so they can pick the package up. As soon as you have flying drones they will have to get near other humans. Ground robots have a huge advantage in that they are less dangerous to humans. Do you really think something that is designed to constantly cooperate with humans is going to fare worse than something that will be near one for a minute? It's very likely that the UAV companies don't test their landing programs sufficiently.

Maybe in a civilized place where there is density and people aren’t wont to commit senseless vandalism. Singapore, urban Finland.

Also it would seem it’s not an energy efficient way to deliver goods to people, but who knows. Paradoxically it would make sense for high value/low mass items like medicines (or narcotics too), but that would make them a more enticing target.

Delivering tacos or sushi on the other hand... maybe years hence.

Prison phones are a hot emerging market that benefit from drone delivery.

They're not efficient ways to deliver to consumers, but to delivery units like the local post office they're remarkably efficient (especially for rural areas). The biggest cost savings to be had would be to deliver from a local warehouse to the nearby DU, where you would pay the last mile carrier to do the heavy lifting. The issue you run into is that there's no appetite for increasing the load at these units, so no appetite for innovation until the infrastructure improves.

A civilized place would not permit the sort of noise pollution that a large-scale drone deployment would generate.

I’ve always felt round things like sushi and burritos could be delivered by putting them into some kind of silicone fairing and firing them from a pneumatic cannon aimed by a computer, no need for autonomous flying robots.

That would definitely work for my burrito place, though I can see it from my front door, so a t-shirt cannon might suffice.

Weight. Weight is the biggest limiting factor stopping drones from delivering packages. By far.

ah, vaporware.

FAA is the main reason and safety overall is still a major issue as well.

Patience, my friend. Media hypes up the tech, but the work will take time.

> This is just to deal with the current surge. They'll be back, with drones.

But they're not stopping the program until June, by which time the shipping will likely have slowed dramatically. Maybe they're announcing it now to appease FedEx and UPS when they desperately need their help, and can just renege later.

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