As someone who frequently orders one can of soup, this is excellent news.
Dropping a can of soup 12ft onto a driveway seems bad for the can and for the driveway.
Self-opening soup can
Just give it a tiny parachute
Operation Gumbo Drop
I'm pretty sure a twelve foot drop onto concrete isn't good for a can of soup. Maybe it'd work for a T-shirt?
Or a beer... As long as it's Lite Beer!
man killed by falling soup can which he ordered on Amazon
Reminds me of an insurance company that wanted to use drones to survey roof damage and in the long run they decided it was overall better to just use a camera on a long ass stick.
Just so you know, companies already use drones for roof surveys. I work for sunrun and we use them to analyze roofs for solar installations and whether roofs need to be fixed before hand.
Meanwhile in Rwanda:
There have been 13,000 deliveries to date and it has been estimated Zipline drones distribute 65% of blood outside of the capital city, Kigali.
https://www.pharmaceutical-technology.com/news/zipline-ghana-medical-supplies-drones/?cf-view
Just because Amazon is doing a terrible job of it, doesn't mean it's a job that can't be done.
Shit like that is also a far, far better use of airspace/resources
Zipline is doing some freaking amazing things!
Ok sure, there's limitations. So what percentage of their current deliveries are actually possible with drones? If it's above 0%, then there's an opportunity.
Beyond that it's a finance/ risk/ reward/ regulation issue.
Imagine a van which drives into a suburban housing estate and instead of parking individually at different houses for 5-10 mins each, spends less than 5 mins prepping a set of drones which take off from the roof of the van and return in minutes.
It saves time and fuel. It doesn't work everywhere, but it doesn't need to.
In fact it could be the same van. Do deliveries exactly as normal, and use a drone for the last half mile when convenient. It's not either/or.
The big win, I hear, is the massively rural areas;farms and cabins.
The truck can apparently launch two drones at a time, and they save time and fuel -- and don't present a driving hazard for a panel van which now needs to turn around in a potentially winding driveway. Then the truck moves on to the next stopping point when all drones are back.
Yeah, "small and below 5 lbs" describes like 90+% of Amazon deliveries.
I would like to take this time to thank the slow government FAA for preventing Amazon from clogging up the airspace with crappy drones and preventing a stupid system from taking off.
Aside from all the functional downsides, I'd expect these to go the way of Tesla when hitting a larger scale. Lawsuits and traffic incidents.
I remember people were hyped when they announced on Thanksgiving 2012 that drone delivery service was right around the corner. Brilliant marketing from them because people were hyped.
Turns out the FAA is that corner
I feel this could actually work fairly well in smaller rural/suburban communities
Maybe if they used bigger craft with larger payload capacity and longer range
And maybe that craft could have wheels instead of rotors to mitigate the rain/wind problems... i think we might be on to something here!
Another more successful operation in Rwanda and Ghana is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipline_(drone_delivery_company) delivering 1.8kg over 300km and dropped by parachute.
That works for special use cases in rural environments. They use drones for mail delivery on some German islands, for instance. As a mainstream delivery option in urban environments this is just laughably impractical and that has been very obvious from day one.
It's certainly more useful in locations with insufficient infrastructure.
And it will keep on being a joke until, suddenly, one day it's not.
The joke are the people that believe drone delivery won't be a thing.
I'll bite.
Drones are loud as fuck and if drone delivery became common there would be a massive backlash from the public. Most people live in cities and do not have a yard to put a target on lol. Drone delivery in cities is almost certainly less cost efficient than truck delivery. Land drones are much more likely in cities, or just dudes with cargo bikes like in many European cities.
So yeah drone delivery might "become a thing" but I doubt it will be mainstream.
And that's not even getting into the point of how much easier and less illegal it is to snipe an Amazon drone out of the sky for its payload than it is to assault an Amazon delivery truck and driver. It may not be more common in the long run than porch pirates, because that's also easy and low risk, but I 100% fully guarantee you our redneck population will be out in some capacity hunting for Christmas presents.
"In the land of the drones, the man with the t-shirt cannon is king."
Noise is absolutely a concern for flying things. The reasons we don't yet have flying cars is not because they're too expensive, but because they're too loud. And this is specifically why the FAA won't let me commute to work in an ultralight.
The police want Bladerunner spinners so bad they can taste it. And the reason they can't have them — or more helicopters — is the noise.
That's not the only reason why flying cars haven't arrived. Getting a license to fly is about the price of a new car. Bad weather is no flying. Air Traffic Control can't handle thousands of commuters. Flying cars are pretty big so parking is going to be even more of an issue.
The average person can barely drive without murdering someone. Flying is even more complex than that, the noise is just a small problem compqred to that.
Welcome to the future
Great, it drops the package from 2 meters.
That's an improvement over the delivery drivers that yeet my package over my fence
It's obvious that autonomous drones are more difficult to create than they seem... I think delivery robots that go on the ground are much safer and more feasible. They can carry heavier packages, they are less dangerous and can travel at less dangerous speeds.
I’m just sitting here thinking personal home delivery maybe isn’t the most sustainable thing in the world.
Perhaps we could invest the massive amounts of money that it takes to deliver goods to homes into better transit and post offices that don’t look like crap.
We've had mail delivery for what, 200 years? We used to have (and some places still do) have milk and vegetable deliveries. It's not even that expensive.
I had diaper pickup and laundry service a few years ago, which was amazing. Well worth the $.
If I'm honest it really is not at all surprising.
Hyperloop 2.0.
Delivering something by air is the least efficient way to do so, unless it's Avdiivka and you deliver a grenade. Yeah, making them now is cheap (and we overproduce these unrecycleable toys), but what the upsides of using them instead of, like, land drones, or human workers, or some rail-system? It's cool and fancy the first time you order it, but what's the reason behind it other than our entertainment? Why not to make a delivery guy shoot fireworks once they are here - as enjoyable, and as chinese as these drones.
Why we want to produce this junk in the first place? And aren't we afraid this shit records close-ups of each property itflies over?
There are places delivery with drones makes a lot of sense and is the best way to do it. It depends what the most important metric is.
In an African country they are delivering medicin and bloodbaths with a drone plane to hospitals that need them for emergencys. That way they only need to have one central stock of these supply's that can be quickly dispatched. Driving wouldn't be an option that would take several hours over bad roads. Veritasium did a video about it.
For Amazon deliveries it makes no sense at all.
I'm curious why the limit is one item. If the drone can carry 5 pounds, why can't they put 5 pounds of stuff in the box?
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
