Both are better than Garret in his 2007 Ford Explorer driving around town all day delivering timbits and tacos.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..?
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.
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.
Though I did wonder how they'll cope in winter-weather. I can't imagine they'd do so well on snow/ice.
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
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.
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...
> 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.
Some aircraft and definitely not drons for now.
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?
So they should have much better efficiency than typical quadcopters
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.
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.
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.
Miniature zeppelins is where it’s at. Bouyancy to just below negative so very little energy needed to lift the device.
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...