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.
Dropping a can of soup 12ft onto a driveway seems bad for the can and for the driveway.
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
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
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.
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.
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
Like a Chinook!?
Haha, now I am picturing a huge Chinook delivering the smallest package of essentially bullshit to my door.
Yeah, I am totally behind that idea.
Or one of the ch54 skycranes delivering a shipping container of amazon returns to the auction winners.
not even necessary a bigger capacity I mean it being just able to bring me like a bag of chips or something I forgot for dinner would be great
While people will undoubtedly take the piss, for a number of reasons, it’s less energy expenditure / lower footprint than you getting in your car/truck and going to the store and getting them yourself.
Would it be less energy expenditure than a delivery van making multiple stops on its way to deliver you your bag of chips?
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.
It’s certainly more useful in locations with insufficient infrastructure.
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.
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.
Because there arent enough people to fill delivery jobs? Or is it that they’d want living wages and health insurance?
Do you seriously think we shouldn’t try to automate things as much as possible? Why keep jobs that no one really wants to do?
Because the reason no one wants to do those jobs is because they don’t pay anything and they don’t have any good benefits.
I would bet people don’t want to do those jobs because they’re not really fulfilling or enjoyable to most.
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 …
Welcome to the future
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.
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?
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?
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.
It can be efficient, but the major pro-land point is: what would it do having 0 fuel?
A car would stop, a drone would drop.
It’s an exception and no one would pilot a drone to it’s exhaustion, but either way holding it in the air is a costy investment.
How do robo-taxis or electric bikes for rent deal with the fuel problem? It’s an already solved issue.
However, you do have a point with malfunctions.
E-bikes and e-scooters are better, but I haven’t personally seen an infrastructure to use them unless they are personally owned and recharged at home. Are there stations for them in the US?
Robo-taxis though are their own can of worms. Discussion about their capabilities can take days.
I’m not sure how it works in the U.S., but in Europe there are stations in which users are encouraged to go to and grab a recharged battery (for a discount.) I’m guessing they have employees who do this as well…
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So do gas stations. I wouldn’t say the gas refueling problem isn’t solved because of that.
Those don’t tend to fall out of the sky when they run out of power.
Understood, but then robotaxis have run over people without the need of flying.
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The first thing you mentioned has nothing to do with fuel, which was OP’s original argument.
As for the second thing, I’ve already said I agreed with OP.
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I’m okay with being wrong. Check my comment history if you’d like in which I happily admit I’m being corrected.
But you didn’t say “depleted” or “out of fuel.” You said “broken.” And that’s different.
Can you admit that you misspoke, then?
