Drones are poised to reshape home design | Hacker News Reader

Drones are poised to reshape home design

wsj.com

28 pointsmaxejennings54 comments

Drones are roughly as loud as a gas powered leaf blower [1]. I bet the hype is going to die real quick when people realize how annoying the noise is. Or at least I hope. Drones are cool but imagining the high-pitched whine of a even a few of these at all times gives me a headache.

[1] https://theconversation.com/drones-to-deliver-incessant-buzz...

That article seems to be claiming that gas leafblowers are 80-85dB.

That's absolutely ridiculous. The quiet ones might be that low, but others can go well over 100dB.

(which is not intended to claim that drones are quieter - leafblower-ish volume sounds about right. they're noisy.)

Um excuse me? Suburbs are filled with the sound of gas powered leaf blowers and monstrous riding mowers all the time from landscaping companies often for hours at a time what makes you think noise is the reason drones will be banned?

Drones tend to have a discordance and dimensionality to the sound that lawn equipment lacks.

Yes definitely; it comes from the four motor whines all slightly out of tune with each other. It's a very annoying and alien sound.

It also triggers survival instincts due to the similarity with the sound of swarming insects.

The average suburban home doesn't get 3 leafblowings a day.

Doesn’t have to be the same home, any home can be getting blown and you’ll hear it.

My friend showed me his dji mavic and it flew up and became inaudible

This is my concern too. I'd far rather they waited a few more years and just used small electric cars on the roads than having loud ass drones buzzing overhead.

Can't be any worse than the rumble of a UPS truck. That carries.

A drone, at least, can stay at an inaudible (say, 500ft) altitude for most of it's trip.

The UPS truck comes to your street once a day. Maybe you get 3 delivery trucks total.

A drone could be in your neighborhood every hour all afternoon. There is someone near me who flies theirs at night, i can hear it much farther away than any delivery truck

That is not a general fact. UPS visits our street probably closer to 5 times per day. Then there’s FedEx, USPS, and Prime all also visiting multiple times per day. Thankfully they are not as loud as the landscape care outfits that run the gas powered blowers n’ mowers.

For deliveries it could have wings and only be loud during vertical landings.

That UPS truck rumble will be long gone in a few years as Ford, Mercedes and Rivian roll out their electric trucks and vans.

And Arrival - https://www.engadget.com/2020-01-29-ups-arrival-electric-tru...

They are definitely audible (clearly) at 500 feet.

This sounds like a business opportunity for someone to create a noise canceling mechanism for drones.

Just a device to emit the counter sound waves to cancel out the drone itself.

What a terrible outlook.

Why not design them like owls? Use flapping wings instead of propellers. Copy how the owls feathers are arranged for quite flight.

Because owls only weigh 4 pounds and can only carry an additional 1 pound.

Also, bird flight isn't just "flap wings". Birds have similar dexterity in their wings as you have in your hands. They maneuver by changing the shape of their fingers.

Is that an inherent physical limit of the design of owls, or are owls not much bigger than that because that's the size that works best in their niche in their environment?

I don't think anybody knows. We can't mechanically reproduce the motion of owl wings so there's no chance to see how far it scales.

Aside from the aforementioned "Skyport" landing pad installed in large buildings, I do not see drones becoming a large part of daily life so long as there's a housing crisis (In the U.S. anyway).

What does a housing crisis have to do with drones?: NIMBYism

The same forces that compel municipalities to heavily restrict the height of a single family home, or absurd setbacks on all sides of the property line etc, are the same forces that will absolutely not tolerate a neighbor constantly having drones buzz in and out of their property and neighborhood. If you've heard a drone fly nearby before, you may be inclined to agree, those things are loud. Until there's a way to fly drones around silently, I see no sensible path to mass market drones.

This isn't an endorsement for or against delivery drones at all, personally I think it would be amazingly convenient, but I also think building densely around transit stations as convenient too, yet NIMBYism in the Bay has all but put a stop to that.

You could have drone ports installed in convenient locations like Amazon locker. In fact, just build out Amazon lockers supplied by drones all over your city. They could handle like 90% of traffic? The large packages would still be delivered by humans. Or maybe ... have them dropped off at the drone port, and then have a wheeled bot make the last mile delivery, since they are quieter.

It seems like drones will mainly be delivering stuff that's locally available anyway, since otherwise it will be at least an overnight lead time and so the package might as well be delivered via truck that's cheaper to operate. If you have to go to a convenient centralized location to pick up a locally available item, you might as well just go to the store and buy the item without involving a drone.

Maybe if you have drones with a large enough service radius, you can centralize warehouses enough to have a much better selection than convenience stores. If you're still delivering to centralized lockers, though, it seems like packages could be batched in trucks as they currently are. I suspect sparsely filled trucks would still be cheaper to operate than drones, even with similar delivery times.

The value of drone based delivery really seems to me to be in getting packages exactly where they are needed faster and cheaper than sending it via direct courier.

Other than wealthy suburbs that are exclusive by their very nature the "housing crisis" only exists in a couple cities. Those "forces" of which you speak don't seem to exist (or if they do they don't have teeth) in most places.

the crisis doesn't exist for most lumps of land, but it exists for most _people_ because the places where the housing crisis is, is where the people are. NYC has more people in it than a third of the landmass of the US

>the crisis doesn't exist for most lumps of land, but it exists for most _people_

No it does not. This "crisis" is mostly a west coast thing and mostly confined to CA at that. Boston, NYC , DC, Chicago, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas do not have these problems. You need to be wealthy to live in their wealthy suburbs or downtown but every city on the planet is like that and for the most part these cities do not have any sort of housing "crisis". Rents are always higher than people would prefer but for the most part housing is available at all price points in these cities.

For people that don't have the means to find housing nor the ability to relocate it's fair to call it a crisis. Their health and welfare is directly at risk and they have limited facility to do anything about it.

For everyone else I'd call it a shortage.

The insistence on low-intensity suburbia is everywhere, it’s just that most metro areas can make arbitrarily much of it. Why fight with the neighbors over infill when there’s a cornfield next to an interstate 15 minutes from downtown?

Miniature blimps maybe?

You could fly a drone right now in and out of your property and no one will stop you. It’s an uphill battle to say deliveries are not allowed. That means personal flights are not allowed. Like really what the fuck are you gonna do? You’re not the FAA (not saying you personally, you as in general).

Depending on your neighbors, though they may not be the FAA: yeah, FAA could shut it down rather quick. The broad rules are fairly restrictive: https://www.faa.gov/uas/recreational_fliers/

In particular, 5: Keep your drone within your visual line of sight, ... and 8: Never fly over any person or moving vehicle. are a bit hard to achieve in residential areas, unless it stays within your yard.

I was expecting this to be about architecture designed to protect one's privacy with a bunch of camera drones whizzing around, but it's quite the opposite. It's about building landing pads for drones into houses.

Let’s say you want a hamburger.

Not from a flying drone, I don't.

Why not? Last mile delivery by drone has huge potential in making neighborhoods better. Less traffic, less ICE engines, faster and cheaper service, easier market entry for new operators.

Marin, CA will ban them on account of the noise drones make.

Surveillance drones in every neighborhood should be valuable to someone. On a plus side, packages can be dropped off in a place harder for random street walkers to approach.

Noise. Pass me the Red Ryder Ralphy.

I understand this is hyperbole, but in case anyone doesn’t realize this - shooting at a drone carries the same penalty in the US as shooting at an airliner.

Because I don't want a side of headache served with my burger. I'll walk five minutes down the street to the burger shop instead. No traffic, just some fresh air.

Congratulations, you are 1 of just 5-10% (I couldn't find an exact number) of Americans who live in a walkable neighborhood.

As if houses with heliports for airlifted burritos won't be be a fad for a privileged few.

You mean more drone traffic that are louder than cars?

ICE engines are going to be extinct anyway.

There's ground drones too, well suited for delivery.

I can see it. Some houses are designed around chimneys. Designing a similar orifice might make sense. The gif presented by the author seems a bit fantastical since you'd release way too much heat/cold air. Just ask anyone who's left the door open for 10 seconds in the winter.

Would be interesting to see what drones look like in 10 years. Birds' wings are near-silent rotating airfoils.

having been buzzed by quite a few birds lately... they're not silent when they're taking off or hovering, they're quiet when they're gliding. humming birds sound like a small drone within about 10 feet.

If you've ever flushed quail, pheasants, ducks, etc,it's not quiet either.

A cursory google search has birds at around 30db and a DJI drone at around 1000x louder at 70db. I think this is something that can be worked on and improved. Also, I'd love to hunt duck one of these days, sounds like a very unique experience!

source: https://www.airbornedrones.co/drone-noise-levels/

I specifically mentioned hovering not flying. We have a humming bird feeder right above a table, them suckers buzz us a lot. 50db my dishwasher is 48db (measured). Humming birds significantly louder when hovering.

Drones are always hovering currently. Yes they can likely get a lot quieter. Planes are still quite loud, they've had 100+ years of work? Birds, they still make noise, and they've had millions. They seem to switch modes of flight to be quiet.

Just to clarify, you measured hummingbirds at 50db?

Birds had millions of years to optimize for lower energy consumption which makes me wonder if it could be mechanized.

I understand where you're coming from with the plane analogy. I'd argue that a lot has been done to cabin acoustics the demand is that its quieter while you're on a flight. The desired for quieter drones stems more from 3rd parties.

Way more likely than a drone is a large mailbox type thing added to the porch.

This way deliveries can be done with less fear of items being stolen.

Man this entire thread is full of people complaining about the noise of quadcopters... they are pretty noisy but y’all really don’t think we can get the noise level to a tolerable level. A lot of naysaying for something that seems pretty cool, maybe I just haven’t had enough coffee to join the default dystopian world view we have rockin here. Sheesh.

"Let’s say you want a hamburger."

Ah, this American life.

https://archive.is/QYOWV

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