A video from Mark Rober about Zipline, to get an idea. I was very impressed when I first heard of them.
Seems absurd when it's put like that. This is possibly something we'll look back on and struggle to comprehend how it was ever the go-to solution.
There's also the simple practical issue: self-driving cars can't navigate a complex crowded environment, whereas self-flying planes navigate a much simpler environment with many more regulatory controls on behavior.
[1] https://www.sustainablebusiness.com/2014/02/surprisingly-air...
It enables higher compression so you can get more power per unit of engine weight, but the fuel efficiency per gallon is lower.
And the lead is for the valves.
You can get more efficient planes but you can’t overcome the need to fight gravity at some point.
Some aircraft and definitely not drons for now.
So they should have much better efficiency than typical quadcopters
But the term commonly refers to all unmanned aerial vehicles.
For example a Global Hawk unmanned aircraft can fly 14,000 nautical miles and remain aloft for 42 hours. They are by definition very efficient. That is a drone.
On the other end of the spectrum The Spirit of Butts' Farm crossed the atlantic with 118 US fluid ounces (3.5 L) of fuel. It was flying for ~39 hour and 1,881.6 mi (3,028.1 km). That is about 2045 mile per gallon if I count it right. That is very efficient, and of course since the aircraft was unmanned it is a drone.
Wow - this is what they are planning to use to deliver packages?
> In fact, unless you drive a car that gets 33.8 gallons per mile (or carry more than one passenger), new airplanes coming off the assembly line are more fuel-efficient
Cars typically get about 0.03 gallons per mile, so it’s not even close.
Of course, that equation changes a bit once there are enough drones that noise pollution and collisions or other incidents become a real issue.
I think this is an good move by the FAA, but I also think that if one of these airplanes flew right into my head at full speed, I'd die.
However, much mini deliveries could be done with vehicles smaller than a full size car - and places where it is common you see lots of mopeds and similar.
People still can die to them.
I like these devices for use for medical supplies but do worry how polluted the skies could become when multiple companies are flying these things for standard packages.
Autopiloted is much easier than cars because air space is less crowded with less obstacles and extremely well controlled. Low flying delivery drones don't fall in that bucket.
I realize that this is a very rough calculation and that of course there would be large variations in flight frequency but no one else seems to be showing anything better.
I don't think I would want to live near one.
It's not hard to imagine how systems like that could be organized.
It's also important to consider how many road vehicle trips this would replace.
How many road trips would it replace? Drones capable of carrying a 5 kg payload over any distance are fairly big. The DJI Matrice 600 Pro for instance weighs 15 kg and is over a metre across. It has a hover time of only 18 minutes. Maximum speed is 65 kph so its round trip range is about 20 km.
A small electric van can easily carry a hundred such packages and has an empty weight of roughly one hundred times that of the drone.
Presumably the drones used for deliveries would have to be much more robust and have much longer ranges, both of which would make them heavier.
So 100 drones replace one van.
I'm sure there are huge holes in my analysis perhaps, you can improve it so that it shows that a substantial number of road trips would be replaced without filling the sky with drones.
Lots of CGI and notices about "simulated" though. The videos that appear to maybe be real show something that does have wings, but looks too small/light/thin to carry much around.
If they were to create a drone that can deliver arbitrary packages, then it needs to be able to lower a package safely. That's what those renders are, they show a typical multi-rotar drone with small wings. So it can stop and lower a package. I don't think there's any real footage of these yet.
The research you linked to doesn't seem to be saying that; it's claims are about the influence of interannual climate variation on timing of migration IIUC.
-- https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/103/2/BAMS-D...
Abstract For ∼100 years, the continental patterns of avian migration in North America have been described in the context of three or four primary flyways. This spatial compartmentalization often fails to adequately reflect a critical characterization of migration—phenology. This shortcoming has been partly due to the lack of reliable continental-scale data, a gap filled by our current study. Here, we leveraged unique radar-based data quantifying migration phenology and used an objective regionalization approach to introduce a new spatial framework that reflects interannual variability. Therefore, the resulting spatial classification is intrinsically different from the “flyway concept.” We identified two regions with distinct interannual variability of spring migration across the contiguous United States. This data-driven framework enabled us to explore the climatic cues affecting the interannual variability of migration phenology, “specific to each region” across North America. For example, our “two-region” approach allowed us to identify an east–west dipole pattern in migratory behavior linked to atmospheric Rossby waves. Also, we revealed that migration movements over the western United States were inversely related to interannual and low-frequency variability of regional temperature. A similar link, but weaker and only for interannual variability, was evident for the eastern region. However, this region was more strongly tied to climate teleconnections, particularly to the east Pacific–North Pacific (EP–NP) pattern. The results suggest that oceanic forcing in the tropical Pacific—through a chain of processes including Rossby wave trains—controls the climatic conditions, associated with bird migration over the eastern United States. Our spatial platform would facilitate better understanding of the mechanisms responsible for broadscale migration phenology and its potential future changes.
Though I did wonder how they'll cope in winter-weather. I can't imagine they'd do so well on snow/ice.
Those wheels look moderately impractical- larger wheels might have more clearance.
Reminds me that we had pneumatic tubes and miniature railways between buildings a century ago.
Also DPD piloted something similar in Milton Keynes and is now going to do it i ten towns in the UK: https://green.dpd.co.uk/news/16
But 'on the streets' in the real world, they're just targets for vandalism and theft.
So I'm just not getting the argument for why we can't trust humans to not vandalize or steal robots, especially internet-connected ones that constantly film their surroundings. I for one believe that just like we can learn to be civil to one another, and can also extend our civility to other species (e.g. we generally don't go around kicking dogs we see on the street), we can also be civil to robots.
Somewhere like Japan, with a strong cultural sense of societal cohesion and obligation, it could work.
But I live in a country where "societal cohesion" and "obligations" are considered communist propaganda and our constitution gives us the right to as many guns as we want in case we decide to hunt the government for sport.
I mean, this robot[0] make it all the way across the Netherlands and Germany, and only 300 miles into the US before getting beheaded.
[0]https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/03/us/hitchbot-robot-beheaded-ph...
Both are better than Garret in his 2007 Ford Explorer driving around town all day delivering timbits and tacos.
What’s more rude? Ordering takeout in bad weather, or not ordering takeout and indirectly punishing the delivery driver’s livelihood whenever the weather is bad..?
Delivery drivers are paid basically solely with your tips.
If you don't order, they don't make any money that day.
If you want to be nice, order that delivery, but tip more.
Bad weather is actually their favorite because people tip more.
Some Californians think that any weather at all is bad, and some midwesterners think “there’s no such thing as bad weather, only wrong clothing”.
I wouldn’t hesitate to order delivery if it were raining or snowing, but maybe in this world there are people who would still order delivery during a tornado warning (because that way they don’t have to risk driving during a tornado).
If it's genuinely life-threatening out, an actual tornado warning, then nobody's delivering in the first place. You can't order delivery even if you want.
It's up to the business and driver (or mayor ordering all non-essential vehicles off the road). Not you.
A van can hold thousands of 2-ounce packages, whereas a drone can hold one. If you look at it in terms of a one-package utilization rate, a van has over 100% rate, because it holds multiple packages, in fact it may have over a 1000% utilization rate using that metric.
You're essentially wasting tons of energy and resources getting very small packages delivered faster, but in urban setting there are no efficiencies here, quite the contrary.
Obviously it would take a lot longer than a direct flight, but the energy consumed would be far less.
Or, people should just make a sandwich.
But Uber eats and DoorDash are a reality, and I would pay someone to pick something up for me from Home Depot within the next hour. Services like Zipline have the potential to help out there.
I've long thought this. UPS isn't driving from the hub to my house to deliver a package, 90% of the incremental driving distance is the length of my driveway.
In a perfect world, yes. In reality, no. You would need a perfect storm of a huge wave of orders all to the same restaurant (or cluster of restaurants) to be delivered to the same neighborhood to ensure timely delivery so the food was hot and the customers were happy. In real life, you are almost guaranteed to never hit the ideal conditions.
Edit: After re-reading your comment, I’d agree with you for the non-food deliveries. My comment was obviously focused more on the UberEats use case.
A locomotive would be even more efficient over long distances, carrying 200,000,000 such packages. A containership even more so, carrying more than 20x the capacity of a big freight train, though I don't think they have the draft to fit up the drainage ditch behind my house. Nor do I have rails.
I jest, but the long tail is a real problem with such efficiency calculations.
You're right that it's never going to make sense to have migrating swarms of drones flying above the interstate carrying packages cross-country, but are real efficiencies here at the individual level:
https://www.cell.com/cms/attachment/4b8da4bb-42c2-4b91-baf2-...
Graphic from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2022.100569.
No, last mile delivery is made package by package. If you place 100 packages in a van and go delivering them, you will make 100 mostly independent trips, just carrying all the packages at once.
That's why those are very often done by motorcycle.
But indeed there is often a highly correlated trip segment. The Amazon's model of running a van into your neighborhood and distributing things there by drones may make sense. It doesn't make sense for Uber Eats business model, but it makes sense for Amazon.
Miniature zeppelins is where it’s at. Bouyancy to just below negative so very little energy needed to lift the device.
E-bike courriers are probably better still but drones are probably faster if you can make them work.
A lot depends on the delivery pattern, of course.
In some places, bikes are first-class citizens of the road, but in other places they're very much not respected and riding one is tantamount to suicide. Every single cyclist I know, when they meet another cyclist, immediately asks about gnarliest injuries and they compare scars like dogs sniffing each other's butts. And in the past 20 years I've lost more friends to cycling fatalities than any other cause of death.
I'll take the drones, thankyouverymuch.
And I live in such a lovely city. I can bike anywhere so quickly, so easily. Scooters & micromobility are abundant. But so many people (so many roommates over time) make a habit of ordering delivery, on such a regular basis. It's unfathomable to me: both the negative impact in general, and particularly here where it's so close & pleasant to go walk or bike around. It's such a huge expense to the world, and such a great enriching activity, getting a little walkabout.
Delivery apps just made people get food from a larger variety of places. Before them, you'd order from the pizzaria that's on the route home, and pick up up before jumping back on the subway. Or you'd eat at the diner on your block.
I do believe minimum wage should be set at the local living wage standard, and that companies like Uber are exploiting their workers through weak labour laws, but unless the market is much more tightly controlled, in a somewhat-free market (which is most of the world) economy, it is a tech issue.
Automating all work, sure. Removing people's mean of subsistance (a wage) and keeping the money for yourself, no. In a capitalistic society, technology only helps people if capitalists give away the product of (automated) labour, and that is not what is happening.
false. no one is forcing these people from taking those jobs (uber eats, grub hub, etc) at the agreed upon wages. tell me how somehow it would be better for those folks if these jobs didn't exist at all given that unemployment in the USA is incredibly low.
UBI is never going to happen
If this rate is too low, then that is what the welfare system is for. Forcing employers to pay a "living wage" for jobs that don't generate a "living wage's" economic value simply retards the economy and robs our children of a wealthier future.
Also low-paid worker sounds strictly better for employment than autonomous drone.
In general barring difficulty in leaving the house food delivery seems awfully optional.
That said for me delivering a package by bicycle+ train + bycycle is an option but it will always be more expensive unless you can stand long delivery times.
[1] https://www.flyzipline.com/newsroom/stories/research-insight...
Here in India a lot of delivery services moved to electric 2 wheelers
Typically I would expect a restaurant lunch in a major city in the US to cost $20-$40 per person after taxes and tip.[1] So, essentially $5,000 - $10,000/year. This was for people with salaries running from about $50,000 - $200,000 before income tax, so something like 7% - 20% of their after-tax income.
Making a lunch and bringing it instead should be less than half of that, especially if one makes extra food for dinner and brings the leftovers for lunch the next day, but I guess a lot of people actively dislike cooking for themselves.
A decent amount of tech workers also get dinner at restaurants nearly every day, which is of course even more expensive.
[1] Excluding inexpensive franchises like McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, because my coworkers typically did not get lunch at places like that.
Compared to everywhere else, Americans make more.
There was a time when ordering lunch was reserved for when you were already "on the town" shopping and the like.
Even debating what mode of transportation should be used seems to miss the larger issue and is even kind of gross to my mind.
I don’t see it ever happening, but I’m not even sure we need package delivery available for anything every day of the week. If we limited it to once per week for bulkier items (such as large furniture), we could reduce a lot of waste and traffic. Rather than deliver tiny lunches via drone, perhaps we should reconsider the greater idea of ordering objects. As someone without a car in a car-dependent city, it’s certainly on my mind.
And this doesn’t expand into societal implications of ordering everything without interacting with other humans. That’s perhaps a more interesting conversation!
For every proposed technology, we need desperately to ask: does this really make ecological sense?
Delivering necessities (e.g. medicine) to a remote township with a drone makes sense. Drone-drop pizzas do not.
Food delivery might be a better comparison, but 2 pizzas and a 2 liter soda is heavy enough to need a fairly massive drone.
And of course the obvious part where it removes hundreds of thousands of vans from already massively congested road traffic. The skies remain mostly unused.
Pollution wise you need to consider the lifecycle of a drone which is likely far worse than a van. Many drones are using very dirty small internal combustion engines. Safety wise replacing 1 van with 30+ heavy drones each traveling far more could easily favor the van.
Longer term it’s more debatable but we hand waving delivery drones as completely pollution free when we don’t know what from they would actually take is simply wishful thinking.
Zipline 2 has a 10 mile range and is VTOL though they’re aiming for a long wire for delivery rather than landing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipline_(drone_delivery_compan...
Zipline 1 does have an 50 mile range but it isn’t VTOL they use fixed wing and have a launching system and a net to catch drones. Packages are dropped at 100 feet while the drone is flying at high speed requiring a parachute and a 5 meter wide landing zone which makes it undesirable for large scale adoption.
That's very interesting. What are current (commercially viable) alternatives to electric drones?
The larger ones tend to have an electric generator to power the control surfaces, smaller drones tend to carry a battery for that and use the engine solely for forward propulsion.
This is for fixed-wing only, so it would apply to Zipline P1 but not P2, by the way. There have been some engine-over-electric setups to run multirotors from a single powerplant, but it's generally awful. It may or may not work for hybrid architectures like a quadplane, or a single-engine-VTOL like a tailsitter, all these things are in active development.
But that's still hundreds of kilograms.
No, let's instead try to game the superlinear scaling of power to weight in helicopters!
Most of the deliveries around the world are done by motorbikes though, not only that but they are done not one at a time but in big chunks. Which is not absurd and pretty good.
Where/when did this style arise?
Where else do people talk like this? What motivates this kind of speech?
The idea is that you want to say everything about the video within 10/15 seconds to make viewer interested.
Just like how you want that the title of HN story must be under 80 character, not 800. Do you start conversation with someone by saying 80 words then go on for 30 minute?
On TV, but it got out of fashion recently.
There's a Monty Python sketch about an island full of foreign news reporters that's quite illustrating.
It’s called “patronizing.” These people think they are more interesting and intelligent than they actually are and take on this air of pretentious lecturing.
TLDR: They use various ways of emphasizing words and adding variety to speech. It's almost exclusively done in videos where it's just a face talking to camera to try to make it attention grabbing.
They use Jon Stewart's Daily Show as a pre- YouTube example of someone using the same techniques for the same reasons.
ps - for those who are not subscribers: https://archive.ph/wkiWt
Essentially its a learned affectation to come off as approachable and unthreatening (see also Jimmy Fallon) to garner views. Read a "boring" technical article at Ars or watch this guy fumble around and be silly and give these practiced big smiles? A lot of people would rather watch a 20-30 minute video that's entertaining and lower information than read a 5 minute article thats denser.
Essentially this is blogspam in video form and it makes a lot of people very wealthy, so its not going away anytime soon.
As someone who loves the arts, but can't get into youtube personality culture, its just so crazy to me people watch these things. They're a bit infantlizing to me. "Oh you want to learn about these drones? Instead of proper sources here's some guy who will pretend to be your friend and do silly comedic things for you while explaining it to you on the 5th grade level." Umm ok.
The most positive thing I can say is that there are people out there who can't read well (or read English at all) or can't learn from reading well, so these videos can be seen as helping a vulnerable demographic in an accessibility-like way. It may also attract younger people who otherwise would never read an Ars or Hackaday or HN (or whomever) article because these outlets are just not super accessible to them (unknown site to them, written on a too low level, etc). And that these video personalities could be a stepping stone into better and deeper media.
Essentially media is a free capitalist market and people choose their media sources, via their own biases and limitations. If they want everything explained to them via a Jimmy Fallon impersonator, then it will happen. Eventually the lowest common denominator demands questionable gimmicks and the market is more than happy to oblige.
Great analysis though, "blogspam" in video form is a fantastic metaphor for the over produced algo gamey vids. (Perfect length to hit max ads, thumbnail, title, intro template, etc)
Well, Mark Rober's intended, primary audience (don't let youtube hear this) is 5th graders so I don't know what you expected.
They aren't trying to sell kiwico kits to 26 year olds you know.
Also HN isnt a 5th grader's venue, so its interesting how normalized it is posting children's media in adult spaces, probably because he doesn't come off as much more childish than most YT personalities.
I felt especially sorry for the people working at the Rwanda site just trying to do their jobs efficiently, while he mucks about being fake-excited about everything. There's almost an air of "smile and nod and hope he goes away soon" about it
I've noticed this among a lot of leftist/Liberal podcasting as well (like Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, lot of NPR presenters).
I don't understand it. it sounds unserious
Every bit of volume pretty directly can knock some ICE usage off the road, and more importantly because batteries are integral to the process it's pretty amenable to be running purely on renewables.
That's a hell of "technology which can just plain make everything better" possibility.
And the other one is in active use.
Look forward to more of their successes.
All the 'hover over the house and winch down the package' aspects are still vaporware.