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Polylactic_acid

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

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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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Currently, all three.

ah, vaporware.

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