Tacocopter - Flying Robots Deliver Tacos To You
tacocopter.com
tacocopter.com
more info: http://photographyforrealestate.net/2012/01/24/warning-faa-s...
[Edit]: Which is not to say that there are hurtling objects on these things, but that this is talking about What Happens Least, and there is just as much risk of something falling from a balcony or second+ story area as there is a drone falling mid-flight.
This is why we have building codes and regulations. Since the FAA did not have these regulations in place, it was disallowed (commercially.) Congress recently said "make the regulations" because it seems like there is enough demand to justify the increased burden on the taxpayer.
To drop something really dangerous off of a balcony usually requires malice or gross negligence, and that generally goes straight down. The operator of a drone with crappy safety systems might simply have to leave it flying for too long without noticing the fuel gauge is nearing empty.
Once the FCC hashes out things like how drones should act automatically in safe ways such that untrained pilots can't easily kill multiple people with them by being slightly negligent or stupid, then I'm all for civilian drone flight.
Isn't that effectively the same as regulating the machine specifically, but without all of the overhead, corruption, and limitations on creativity, and wouldn't the law actually have the same effect if persons found to operate drones in an unsafe manner were actually prosecuted? Wouldn't the market only accept safe drones due to the possibility of jail time?
Just curious. Been kicking that line of thought around a lot as I've been in some creaky elevators recently.
Unfortunately, modern markets are empirically fairly poor at optimizing for long-term outcomes with all externalities accounted for (example off the top of my head: the Deepwater Horizon oil spill).
When a major malfunction or accident does happen, no penalty or fine is really sufficient to bring about any meaningful sense of justice. (Think again the oil spill, or a tainted staple food poisoning tens of thousands of people, or to use a really cliché example, a malfunctioning UAV crashing into a group of kids playing at recess.) As the accidents are often due to incompetence or attempts at cost-cutting rather than outright malice, the deterrence factor of the penalty doesn't really apply – to those guilty, it just looks like they're taking the good kind of risk optimizing their systems until it's too late. The guilty corporation simply can go bankrupt and out of business, and finding and then charging personally responsible employees isn't always easy.
While government regulations might not be the most efficient, they do not cloud a picture of exactly how safe a plant is and will remain that would otherwise be perfectly clear. Short of each investor evaluating safety of each plant, oil rig, and factory themselves, the situation with government regulation removed would boil down to an analogy to the S&P credit rating business. We've seen how for-profit independent third-party rating business has worked out.
If you'd like an example from a market with little regulation, look no further than Bhopal.
I'm not going to argue that the current regulations we have in place are amazing. They're not and they can certainly be improved. I will, however, argue that they do a better job keeping us safer than the free market, as it has been implemented worldwide over the last century, would.
Having a law in place is a start, but it has little effect against those who would cut corners. I believe the saying is that "laws only keep the lawful honest." There will be a lot of manufacturers building TacoCopters who will cut corners because it's cheaper, and others who simply don't care because the don't expect to get caught.
However, if the FAA mandates (e.g.,) complete engine teardown and rebuild every 200 operating hours along with an annual FAA inspection, they can actually verify that those procedures are being followed. The law will still be in effect, but verifying that it is being followed happens well before someone is killed and will take the vehicles most likely to kill someone out of the air.
That's what they're trying to accomplish.
v(h) ~ sqrt(h)
thus
Ek(h) ~ v^2 (h) ~ h
Which means, the higher something starts, the more it will hurt when it hits your head.
Police in Mesa County, Colorado received the first authorization ever for police to fly UAS. That was last year. Since then, a county in Florida received authorization. Police in Texas toyed with the idea, but decided it wasn't in the budget. So i know of precisely two police precincts with legal authorization. It's possible there's a couple others I haven't heard about, but the total number is still very small. Even the Utah Highway Patrol got slapped down by the FAA for flying without authorization.
M. Wilson at the FAA has denied applications for certificates of authorization (COAs). Without his signature, the popo doesn't get to fly.
The film: http://vimeo.com/36341233
(I wish it were that easy... tacocopter clearly qualifies as something I absolutely never knew that I really really need right now)
As of today, the only legal way to fly a UAS in the U.S. requires case-by-case authorization.
It sounds like a cool project.
Also, Zerocater could be all over this :)
No one argues this is not true, it's the premise that's unlikely.
Can you offer more details?
Realize here that we're not talking about software running on a server in a nice temperature controlled room. This is software controlling hardware that is under constant vibration, will get sticky, or bend, or break, or ice up under variable conditions - hot, dry, rainy, wind gusts as it goes from behind a building to crossing an intersection. There is a mind boggling number of things that can go wrong when you're controlling a device in the 'real world.'
Even if the software is perfect there is still a large number of variables to account for and most of them can't be controlled. There's a case for UAVs and I would love to get involved with them, but building a reliable UAV and properly maintaining it would almost certainly cost too much to have it deliver tacos. Unless you're willing to spend $250 to avoid walking a few blocks.
Should we start testing UAVs for commercial applications? Yes. Should we allow 13 years old kids to code on them and build their new cool pizza delivery service? Not yet, I think. Just my $0.02.
At the moment, a 13 yr old could fly a radio controlled F-15 legally, so long as it was for recreation and not for commercial usage.
I'm talking, of course, of the 'killer' app - assassination!
This is just another little taster of the wild ride we're in for.
You'd be talking custom made machines, because you just know some idiot is going to hook a box of chow mien noodles onto the skid of a robocopter and it'll get dive-bombed by a pigeon and land on someone's wind shield in the middle of rush hour traffic.
The problem that robotic helicopters, and other flying devices, are going to face is that they're legally liable for anything they damage below them if something falls. When you're 50' up, you don't want to be dropping a single thing over a roadway or side walk. It also brings up the questions of insurance, registration (to ensure all UAV's flying are insured and maintained) and more, because any accidents have the potential to be equal to a motor vehicle accident in terms of personal injury claim.
Operators literally have to have no choice to make sure there's the ability for them to get sued for accidents/drops, otherwise municipalities will quickly outlaw them and once that happens it's going to be decades before those municipalities change their minds.
so what? there are thousands of car accidents and deaths every year that doesnt stop majority from riding. What OP did is open my eyes on something I didnt think of before. Imagine a crowded city, like NY where 5 feet above your head there are hundreds of drones like bees flying everywhere and delivering goods: food, small mail, lighweight groceries, etc. That would be great win for problems with traffic in big cities. Mother Earth would appreciate that too. Awesome idea OP.
EDIT: you could also have personal delivery done this way, something like "electronic mail pigeon". You attach your lighweight package and you send it across the city. Of course we would need to minimum probability of accidents. Most likely software used would have to be governmet-approved/tested and you would have to have a license to be a part of "lightweight transportation channel" that flows above the city. But this is totally doable!
Excellent visualization. You've nailed the kind of socio-infrastructural change this shift could lead to.
Licensure, state registration, federally-mandated commercial drone manufacturing standards, and liability insurance may sound like a damper on the future, but by ensuring a baseline of safety and reliability, it will ultimately open up the market to all sorts of innovation.
There is, and that's to get "everyone" to do it. I recall the recent HN-linked article [1], which called for a large number of people to demand a trial, rather than take a plea deal, because that would collapse the system. Or, if everyone carried a gun, openly, and without a permit, the government couldn't stop the practice because it wouldn't have the resources to disarm an entire, determined population. The same is true for these tiny flying machines. The main problem, though, is the expense, as it would be a lot easier for any given person to acquire a gun than to acquire one of these, but the principle is the same. That leads to the observation that the expense is there because of lack of innovation in the field, and said lack exists due to laws restricting the use of anything which could be built. The answer is to simply ignore the laws, while pursuing the best technical answers, such as, for example, applying the recently-developed techniques of self-assembly, from the creators of the Harvard Monolithic Bee [2], in an effort to drive down costs and democratize the process of construction and ownership of tiny copters, so that, in fact, pretty much everyone who wanted to could possess one.
1) Have you ever flown an RC plane? Do you know a) How difficult it is? b) How little control you have? c) How dangerous it is if not controlled? That's why (sane) people fly their planes in big fields away from people, trees, power lines, clotheslines, satellite dishes, etc.
2) More broadly, we are only beginning to have good algorithms for awareness of automobile traffic conditions. (Google's work with driverless cars, for example.) This is basically 2-D work on roads, which are specifically designed to avoid interference from external sources. None of these apply to drone aircraft. In addition to the obstacles above, how do avoid all the potential objects (other drones, birds, party balloons, etc) in proximity? We're nowhere near close to solving these problems.
3) Yes, there are accidents by delivery drivers every day. But it's clear who's responsible for any damage: the human driver(s) who are presumed to be carefully monitoring the entire process. Are mom and pop taco houses (or any other sized business) prepared to take the full liability of an autonomous flying thing? I doubt it.
All the videos we've seen (and I admit some are breathtaking) have been created by people firmly at the controls, whose full attention is focused on the task, and who are prepared to take the responsibility for any problems they cause.
Many people have enjoyed the quadrotor videos from labs such as UPenn's GRASP lab. No one at the controls. Though the miniature flyers at Penn do use external localization and pre-computed trajectories, others are completely autonomous and react in real time.
http://www.idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda-weehawken_burri...
(I know this is likely to be downvoted as being a joke comment but considering I don't believe the original site to be more than a funny joke I would expect upvotes for all funny comments)
Did you know the word "gullible" isn't in the dictionary?
Sigh. Prepare for loads of credulous coverage, matching the wave of reporting on the Pirate Bay's stoned suggestion that "we're going to use, er....GPS drones!....to file-trade from the sky. With Raspberry Pi."
http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/did-you-know-the-word-gu...
There are plenty of real efforts underway to use UAV's in a similar fashion -- for example, to deliver medications in disaster-stricken areas [1] and for building construction [2]. We all have very little time and attention. I simply suggest that we allocate it wisely.
[1] Matternet, a Singularity University spinoff -- http://matternet.net/
[2] ETH researchers use UAV's to build 6-meter tower -- http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/diy/video-watch-...
I'm disappointed in how cynical you people are. We live in a magical world, with axolotls and honey badgers; can we not dare to dream in the TacoCopter?
The preface is to say: I get it. I do it. I love it. And, I'll probably stay in this hobby forever. Having kids has a way to help with that.
Having said that, I also understand, in no uncertain terms, just how dangerous this stuff can be. I have seen many nasty accidents first hand. A small propeller spinning at 5K or 10K RPM can shred a hand or a face in horrific ways.
The idea of toy drones flying around town is a scary one. The FAA is right in wanting to exercise restraint and gradually walk into a sensible set of rules. The have been working very closely with the RC flight community in order to understand the needs and voice their concern as well:
http://www.modelaircraft.org/aboutama/gov.aspx
I love the idea of small inexpensive drones coming online to help firefighting efforts, disaster aid and such needs. Still, it has to be done right and it has to be done with safety in mind.
Small inexpensive model aircraft, even when they cost thousands of dollars, are not designed to the same strict engineering standards of full-scale aircraft in general aviation. Most of these devices suffer from catastrophic single-point failures in their designs. None of them are put through strict process control during manufacturing to ensure that such mundane things as cracked or "cold" solder joints don't creep into a batch. None of them are made with conformal or environmental coatings applied to circuitry. Not one of them uses rugged, vibration and environmentally-tested hardware, boards, wiring, connectors and batteries.
As an example of this, a prominent motor controller manufacturer recently produced designs that started to violently catch on fire and even blow-up under varied conditions. They have been reported to catch fire by simply plugging in a battery or in the middle of a flight. In a lot of cases people have lost helicopters costing thousands of dollars to this particular problem. However, in most cases, because the activity took place within the confines of AMA model aircraft flying fields not one person seems to have been hurt and no property (other than the model and electronics) was damaged.
Did you know that the LiPo (Lithium Polymer) battery packs these models use can also spontaneously catch fire and explode? YouTube search: "LiPo fire"
It's exciting to think of these little things flying about and doing all kinds of things for us. The reality, I think, is as far away as building a C3PO that actually works as it does in the movie. OK, maybe not that far, but nowhere close to reality. The legal and liability hurdles alone are massive.
Can someone make a quadcopter that can safely and reliably fly around buildings in a city with an acceptably low probability of failure, redundancy and solid engineering? Sure. But it isn't going to be anything like these little toys we are seeing in hundreds upon hundreds of youtube demos.
I believe that, once the FAA has a chance to sort this out there will be really good opportunities for very high quality, professionally designed drones. It'll be a few years though. And rightly so.
This is a truly revolutionary idea, one that has so many different positive side-effects (reduce traffic congestion, reduce pollution, faster deliveries, cheaper mailing costs, etc). It needs to be pushed forward by visionaries, folks who really believe in it.
Yes, they'll have to be a little crazy. Yes, they'll likely have to deal with setbacks.
But if they persist and succeed, their name just might one day be written in history books.
I believe you misspelled evolutionary. Inventing a helicopter was a revolutionary idea (pun!), and coming up with a delivery model for food consumption may have been a revolutionary idea, but combining the two definitely is not.
This is basically a sky lawnmower with a taco hanging below it. Seems kinda dangerous.
Carriages and Internal Combustion Engines -> Automobiles
Telephones and Radios -> Cell Phones
Touch Screens and Cell Phones -> iPhone
So to sum it up....just this specific combination is not revolutionary.
There is also an entire industry based on keeping children safe from everyday dangers. We have baby gates, plugs for electric outlet, fences for yards, childproof medicine caps, cabinet lock, etc. Exactly how are you keeping your child safe from the swarm of helicopters delivering tacos en masse to the park he's playing in? Do kids need to walk around in protective bubbles because the need to avoid waiting in line at Chipotle outweighs the need for safety?
Most things in life have danger.
Once again, Mark Twain said it best: "He who holds a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way".
It would be amazing if real though. Maybe someone can make a hydrocarbon powered version that would actually have enough range. It would use less fuel than a car, and get there faster to boot.
Startup idea?
I think it'd be possible to build a large quadshot-esque quadrotor -> flying wing device that would have the 1-3 mile range and ~500gr non-battery payload capacity necessary for taco delivery.
OMnomnomnomnomOM
In Spain gitanos will learn how to pilot UAVs (or "fish" them) in a blink of an eye.
Disliking a parasitic culture that fosters the notion that it is okay to steal from "others" is not racism since it a) has nothing to do with race but culture, and b) it's based on fact, not prejudice.
The technology is there. The regulations need to catch up.
[1] Theoretical easy-to-deploy Android or Raspberry Pi-sized wifi-broadcasting device, to broadcast TPB magnet links.
This will eventually happen, though. That means the FAA's going to have to come up with some pretty strict regulations to force manufacturers and operators to ensure their bots don't crash into things/people.
You place an order on your cell phone. The copters immediately go to work delivering whatever you needed. A SMS would alert you that your goods have arrived. Maybe there would be secure drop zones where a giant chute would automatically route your package into a secure locker. You would open the locker with your cell phone.
Okay I will stop dreaming now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvRTALJp8DM&feature=youtu...
Georgia Tech did more with the larger Yamaha Rmax helicopter.
Commercial UAVs being illegal in the US, "might as well hang for a sheep as for a lamb."
Something tells me Amazon will run with this in 10 years and take USPS/Canada Post/etc out of business
With all the crazy scamming I've experienced on places like Craigslist, I can't imagine there wouldn't be some jerk that would just start taking the vehicles. Even if there's some type of visual/tracking, they'd figure it out. How many tacos would have to be delivered to deal with that kind of shrinkage?
I can't tell if this is a joke (?), but the technology is definitely available to make it happen.
http://www.diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/why-doesnt-the-ball-...
They are in active use today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_attacks_in_Pakistan
That said, if you want that sort of delivery, you'd be better served strapping a bomb to the drone instead of mucking around with bullets.
I'm not saying we should ban these.. don't know why I got buried.