Amazon's drone delivery program is the joke it always sounded like.
Amazon's drone delivery program is the joke it always sounded like.
COLLEGE STATION, Texas — Exactly a decade ago, Amazon revealed a program that aimed to revolutionize shopping and shipping. Drones launched from a central hub would waft through the skies delivering just about everything anyone could need. They would be fast, innovative, ubiquitous — all the Amazon ...
Only one item can be delivered at a time. It can’t weigh more than 5 pounds. It can’t be too big. It can’t be something breakable, since the drone drops it from 12 feet. The drones can’t fly when it is too hot or too windy or too rainy.
You need to be home to put out the landing target and to make sure that a porch pirate doesn’t make off with your item or that it doesn’t roll into the street (which happened once to Lord and Silverman). But your car can’t be in the driveway. Letting the drone land in the backyard would avoid some of these problems, but not if there are trees.
Amazon has also warned customers that drone delivery is unavailable during periods of high demand for drone delivery.
As someone who frequently orders one can of soup, this is excellent news.
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!
As long as you don't leave your car in the driveway.
People buy clothes off of Amazon?
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.
Yeah this sounds like a great use for drones- take photos of high up places that is dangerous to climb to
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!
Yeah. Personal deliveries to your home may never be a practical thing. But, Zipline shows that there is a niche for drone deliveries that's pretty amazing.
It's real macgyver stuff. Maybe it doesn't fit into the cyber aesthetic, but its some pretty fucking amazing stuff. I hope more such applications get found in time.
Ok. That's incredible. This is more what I saw for the technology's potential. Not cutting all corners possible to make delivery of disposable goods worse.
If you're interested there are some great videos about it.
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 remember people being hyped about netting them or shooting them out of the sky.
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
That's where range issues pop up.
And poachers perhaps
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.
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.
Also, imagine drunk flyers in bad weather.
Ground traffic collisions can also cause collateral damage, but more often than not those are constrained to the roads or their immediate vicinity where not many people live. An aerial collision may happen above residential areas, and even slight fender benders may mean a double crash (...on little Timmy mowing the lawn).
Also, there's no air bag in the world that can save you in a crash.
Road traffic is easy to direct and regulate with road signs, lanes, lights, painted lines. Good luck herding cats a hundred (hundreds of) yards above ground. It's not a huge problem with planes because there are not as many of them and they fly at vastly different altitudes. Not the case with personal flying cars.
With ground traffic, you only need two blinkers (or two sets). Some drivers even struggle with using that two properly. Good luck for getting them to use more.
And that's just the top of my head, I'm sure there are like 2634 other reasons.
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.
Flying cars would almost certainly not be directly piloted. Even in movies, by the time humanity has flying cars, it has automation to handle those flying cars.
We have flying cars, they are called airplanes or more specifically civil utility aircraft. You know, like the Cessna 172.
Flying vehicles aren't more mainstream because of the cost. A new plane can cost over half a million dollars while a used plane can easily be over a hundred thousand dollars. And that's just the cost of the plane.
The other reason is because the rules are more strict and are actually enforced. If a pilot flew their plane like the average person drives their car they would be sitting in jail await trail for attempt murder.
We have flying cars, they are called airplanes
I think you're missing the cars part of flying cars.
Like, the dream isn't to drive your car to the airport and get into an airplane. The "car" part of flying cars is about having one in your driveway.
A new plane can cost over half a million dollars while a used plane can easily be over a hundred thousand dollars
You can get a used Cessna for under $60k:
But, the issue isn't the up-front cost. Because a plane isn't a flying car, you have to store it somewhere, and that isn't cheap. Even just tying it down outdoors can be more than $150/month. Then there are the operating costs, which are much higher than cars: insurance, annual inspections, fuel, maintenance, etc.
The reasons we don’t yet have flying cars is not because they’re too expensive, but because they’re too loud
I'm sure being too loud is an issue, but it's not the issue. That's like saying the reason we don't all have castles is due to municipal zoning laws. Sure, that would make having a castle harder, but it's not the issue.
Yes, "flying cars" are loud, but that's a minor issue compared to the other ones. They're expensive to operate. They're dangerous both to their passengers and to people on the ground. They're extremely expensive. The infrastructure isn't available. They'd require training to operate, etc.
If you could wave a magic wand and make all those other problems disappear, the noise issue would still be a blocker. But, the noise issue isn't the biggest current blocker.
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
12 feet is more like 3.5-4
Just like plopping a grenade in a foxhole ..
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.
... and they can get robbed or kicked, their sensors sprayed shut... and repair costs a fortune. I don't think delivery without a human makes much sense, maybe except for a drone that delivers to the Australian outback or a small island at the German coast.
They want desperately to cut delivery cost by taking out the human they have to pay for it to do the work. To do so they spent billions they could have used to pay these people a decent wage and hire more of them. It is dumb.
Solution: every 17th drone is a decoy carrying a paint bomb to mark anyone who robs it or were just standing around not trying to defend it or defending it effectively enough. Then the Amazon corporate police can swoop in and deal with anyone with paint on them.
There are ways to prevent that, like alarms, notifying the police. These robots will absolutely have ways to be tracked at all times, cameras and all. You could also only use them for low value packages, so the effort is less worth it.
And use less energy since they don't have to fight gravity
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 agree with you.
I've mentioned ukrainian Avdiivka, a battlefield, that isn't accesible by usual means (and where aerial drones can launch a surprise attack).
The same goes to places with destructed or underdeveloped infrastructure.
Drones can be used in the least accesible places. But they ate tested in places that are already covered by drivers.
I disagree with you with the efficiency comment. In an ideal scenario, deliver by air can be super efficient. No road obstacles, shortest path trajectories, hell, the sky is 3D!
It's been tried before: messenger pigeons.
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?
Maybe is the delivery part, like you can make it easy to make one drop, but to select one from the individual packages to drop while leaving the other are not as easy.
It will be good for things like medications, small electronics, and basic kitchen supplies.
I'm not sure I'd want my small electronics dropped onto tarmac from 12 feet up. I don't care how much bubble wrap you use, that does not sound ideal.
Best for medications as you said.
just yeet the knife
Maybe the end game is something far more sinister and this is a good way to iron out the bugs.
I mean, the most obvious sinister application for this tech I can think of would be military dones that precisely drop small bombs on targets, but based on the ongoing war in Ukraine, that technology already has been developed, so Amazon of all companies developing it again would be pointless.
EDIT: come to think of it though, while the technology for that military application already exists, having a delivery drone industry might be a benefit to a country in wartime anyway, because the factories to build those drones could be repurposed to make military drones, and the drone fleet itself could be requisitioned, sort of like how navies have often throughout history pressed civilian ships into service in various roles, and with probably minimal modifications be used to gain a sizable fleet of bombing drones very quickly without having to have the military maintain that fleet idle in peacetime. Not sure this actually benefits the company much though, just the country that has a sizable network of these drones and/or factories to build them within it's control.
it's just advertising it's not really meant to be practical you're advertising for them good job
I'm not sure how 'Amazon failed at doing something they promised and ended up with a shitty result' advertises them. That's like saying telling people that McDonalds food is full of E. Coli is an advertisement for McDonalds.
It raises the question why a drone can't deposit it lower than 12 feet. Is this drone theft control?
It can't be allowed to fly too close to people, and there's also concerns with interfere, collisions, animals, etc
Having built commerical drones, it's mainly two things, obstacles and ground effect.
Probably loss of signal from GPS for one, and there are far more obstacles like power lines that can be hit below 12 feet.
Assuming you live in any moderately-developed area, yeah this is kind of a useless service. But I can see this being very useful for people who need things delivered to remote or otherwise hard-to-access places where a delivery vehicle can't easily get to. Until the cost of maintaining a drone fleet drops substantially, I don't see it being more feasible than the standard delivery van service for most people, not for a while at least.
So in this scenario an Amazon driver is driving near a remote, hard to access location that a truck can't get to, loading a package onto a drone, and then waiting for it to fly to your hermit shack and back? If your area isn't moderately developed you're probably not going to have an Amazon drone hub within range.
Non-fixed wing drones don't have much range.
can't fly when too hot
What the fuck?! My cheap ass, $10 AirHog drone that is entirely plastic and foam can fly in 115F temps (as hot as it's ever been here). What the shit kind of crappy components do Amazon's delivery drones use?!
They're using a very dated design because the FAA moves extremely slowly. The size, weight, and wide-scale intended use of them puts the drones in an aircraft category that comes with a lot of paperwork and stipulations.
In this case I would consider that a good thing. The day drone delivery because common will be a very noisy day.
Ew... Bureaucracy.
Flying with a payload requires a lot more lift which goes down as temps go up, plus it could be just the heating of the motors under load that have a certain limit before they tend to fail.
Maybe just a safety precaution for lipo batteries? Given the potential hazard of bursting into flame near or on a house
See also: Royal Mail in the UK experimenting with drones. Not doing the last miles delivery to customers, but reinforcing the network with a human still actually shoving the damp bits of paper through the door.
Interesting. That's dealing with deliveries over water though, where you can't get a truck to simply distribute stuff efficiently
It carries the mail carrier over the water so they can put the mail in the slot?
Excellent.
I get that this is probably more a learning experience than anything…butttt
The way the world is going and the conditions this thing needs to operate? Idk man
This service was announced more than a decade ago. If they're still having learning experiences, I think they may be trying too hard to get this to work.
Yeah, why wouldn't they just give up after a couple of years, silly people.
The program itself isn't absurd, but Amazon is a bunch of fucking clowns. I only expect them to fail in the world of logistics. But they're so big & everybody keeps giving them their money, they can do whatever they want, poorly, forever. They fail 'up'.
Drone delivery is indeed part of the future of logistics. They just need to make the drones more robust to handle slightly bigger, heavier loads, like at least 10# would be great & a reasonable goal. Arm it with AI so it knows where to drop the payload. Etc etc. There are indeed a number of kinks to be worked out....and who better to crash & burn, learn on than Amazon? 🤡
I live on the 10th story of an apartment building. Where does the drone deliver my 10 pound load to?
I live in a duplex with a front yard that's about two square feet between the front stoop and the sidewalk. Where does the drone deliver my 10 pound load to?
I live in a house surrounded by a lot of trees. Where does the drone deliver my 10 pound load to?
I have an enclosed front porch, inside of which deliveries can safely be left without worrying about them being stolen. Where does the drone deliver my 10 pound load to?
Drone delivery to someone's home might be useful for a small number of people in specific circumstances. Most circumstances would be far more efficient if done by a human.
What does this actually solve?
In Germany we have a trial run of food delivery. A drone will bring a package with up to 4.5 kg to a "remote" village, then some students on e-bikes will bring it to the houses. Why they are using drones instead of one lorry a day is unknown.
I've seen videos of a firm doing interesting stuff with bigger "mothership" drones that hover much higher and then lower a much smaller drone like thing on a cable to place the parcel on the ground. They can hit pretty precise targets and can maneuver around more obstacles than bigger drones can.
All that needs to happen is for the tech to advance to the point where it's cheaper to do x% of their deliveries via automated drones than it would cost to have delivery drivers do it and they'll start doing it. Saving millions(billions?) by say halving the number of human operated delivery trucks will make it a no brainer for them.
In all of the above, where either the landlord or the recipient specifies (and when it's decided by the landlord, the buyer gets precise location info to pass to Amazon when buying stuff, which would include instructions for how to retrieve it after delivery)
In all cases the property owner would be responsible for ensuring there's a suitable landing location. Preferably combined with lockboxes which drones can directly deposit packages to.
I agree with the others that aerial drones is usually not the most efficient. But in some cases the destination is complicated to reach by foot and then they're useful. Otherwise land based drones could easily be used (imagine a Segway style delivery bot!)
This sounds like a terrible premise for an episode of the Jetsons
How is the delivery drone going to navigate around my wire antennas strung between the trees?
Even when you know where they are, they're hard to see unless the sun hits them just right.
I suspect that would be your responsibility to either clear the area or not use the service. I can see the service having some useful niche case uses. Mainly if you need something light on short notice.