> Its propellers have a slight S-curve designed to lower their noise to make them more acceptable for use in populated neighborhoods, Kimchi said. The craft is far more stable in high winds than more traditional drones, he said.
Noise is my main concern with drone delivery networks. I have been playing with radio controlled aircraft for most of my life. I see drone delivery as inevitable, but living near a noisy drone delivery route could really lower quality of life for the people on the ground.
> Noise is my main concern with drone delivery networks.
What about 20-50 lb flying machines falling onto sidewalks, roofs, and streets?
You don't see amateur RC aviation enthusiasts flying their model airplanes in the middle of the city, and I sure as hell don't want to see a corporation doing this on an industrial scale.
This probably isn't for cities. I was at a conference a few years back where Prime Air gave a talk. It was quite a vague talk, but admittedly it was hilarious watching Takeo Kanade grill the speaker on technical details that he refused to elaborate on. Things have no doubt moved on, but they were talking about use cases like delivering to rural areas where people have big gardens to land in. So potentially places where sending a delivery truck miles out of the way would be expensive (e.g. a 20 minute detour to one house). That's where the interesting applications of drone delivery are.
That drone is pretty big, and they're getting extra lift out of the wings which conveniently double as prop guards. Flight time is presumably at least an hour, if it can get something to a customer in half an hour (and has to get back). You'd need quite a few since each drone can therefore only make around 10-20 deliveries a day if they swap out the batteries when it lands. 30 mile round trip range is pretty decent. Also on size - you need somewhere to land it with a few metres wriggle room either side. There's no way that's going into a built up area.
There's no point doing drone delivery in urban environments, the safety case is insane and you're competing with excellent existing delivery channels.
Why are you downvoted? Safety is a thousand times more concerning - the drones will mechanically fail, they will hit bad weather, they will collide with birds, there will be new drone delivery market entrants and will need coordination across systems... If a drone fails at an expected operating altitude, it can kill someone easily on the ground. If it fails at height over a highway, what if it kills a bus driver or causes a tractor trailer to lose control? What if they hit electric lines? What else can go in flight corridors at the same altitudes? Do they container chemicals or voltages that first responders have to be aware of?
There's a reason why it's taking so long for Amazon to get FAA approval for drone delivery and this is exactly why. There are people in important places asking these sorts of questions already.
My guess personally, is that drone delivery will ultimately just be a tool for a self driving truck to get the package from the truck to the door. Drones are not nearly good enough as it stands today to do end to end deliveries at an industrial scale outside of maybe a few rural areas.
I get your point but the relevant agency division FAA AVS employees 7,200 people [0]. Fewer than that are involved in certifying aircraft safety. Agencies like all other human groups have cultures.
I don't think people fully appreciate the carefulness with which the FAA has approached this, nor the full scope of the scenarios they have considered.
If you look at the first FAA waivers to operate drones industrially -- 5 years ago! -- you will notice that all of the approved drones are military drones. Why military drones? Because the approved drones often had a decade or more of operational use in explicitly hostile environments and very poorly controlled conditions. Being able to reliably operate in those conditions was considered strong evidence they were unlikely to start falling out of the sky when operated under much better controlled environments and less risky conditions.
The challenge for many new drone builders is that their platforms are not built anywhere close to the reliability and resilience standards of military drone systems, which are typical the product of companies with proven aviation/avionics systems engineering experience and bankrolled by US defense spending. Even when they build systems that on paper meet this level of engineering, the lack of operational history and experience puts these drones on the slow path to approval.
Amazon getting the FAA to sign off on industrial use of an exotic drone airframe with no operational history strongly suggests that its safety and resilience characteristics are excellent, at least comparable to drones designed to survive military environments.
The comment is uninteresting and rightly downvoted because (1) it's been discussed to death and has nothing to do with this particular experimental drone model and (2) we already have effective legal apparatuses to deal with liability.
Neither of those are reasons to not discuss this more. We, as a society, prevent all sorts of things from happening without having to just wait for a lawsuit to settle things or whatever.
One has to actually make an argument for the liability system being insufficient. Merely pointing out risks is not enough, especially since no one here has bothered to even do an order-of-magnitude comparison between the risks and the benefits. It's just noise and emoting.
Do you really, like I mean _really_ need your stuff from Amazon same day, hours after ordering it? No, you really don't. Nobody does. It's a convenience, a nice-to-have, but is totally unnecessary.
So, I think the burden of proof lays squarely on Amazon and it's proponents of this type of service, to prove beyond any reasonable doubt the risks can be mitigated to the point where the public accepts them as a trade-off.
Having potentially 50lbs of drone fall on your car while you're driving home from work is probably not going to be acceptable... to name just one risk that will have to be proven to be minimized. Or noise levels will be controlled near neighborhoods etc... Other industries have to prove their new thing is safe and acceptable for the public... why should Amazon be any different?
Not to mention people's heads! I have faith in agencies like the FAA to keep things safe and reasonable, and where that isn't enough NIMBYs and municipal governments will pick up the slack, no doubt.
Interesting point. Maybe instead we should be using self-driving cars with drones (or something ground-based, like RC skateboards) only handling moving packages from the car to the door.
In addition to noise, I'm also concerned about visual clutter, particularly in residential areas.
The last thing I want is to add to the power lines, airplanes, etc. with the visual noise when I'm on my deck trying to enjoy nature.
Further, Amazon is a major player in the advertising space now. I'd be surprised if at some point these weren't leveraged to display ads in some format. I'm a marketer by trade, but personally that's a line I don't want crossed.
Cars, roads and trucks have been around for a century, and none of us were around to discuss that.
Also now we have a century worth of experience to apply to deciding to add new vehicles to our environment.
And finally for the most part cars, trucks etc are primarily fixed routes - roads.
We know where they are, there's planning and committees around design and disruption before they are set in place.
Drones move in a 3 dimensional space, with no set routes, and very few no fly zones.
Basically imagine a moped that can fly over your property or circle where you live looking for an address.
Not to even mention the privacy issues, most cars are still lacking in cameras, or scanning technology.
Delivery drones will need that stuff to be standard.
My main concern is the audio and video recording devices that will undoubtedly be attached to these drones (if history is any guide, likely without any disclosure).
I foresee ads for rakes when Amazon notices that there are lots of leaves in my yard.
I don't know why people think this is a good thing right now.
My first thought was "well, maybe you do need a rake". But I guess it probably can't see into your shed/garage/etc to know whether you actually have a rake or not. Ads for things you already have are such a waste.
> I have been playing with radio controlled aircraft for most of my life
RC Helis 60 Size Gas back in the old days. You had to manually control everything. You had to built it from scratch. [1] The ones they have now are so simple and easy they are no fun at all. I wonder if you feel the same way?
I am still not getting how this is possible given weather conditions and variability.
[1] Electric? Only thing like that I ever saw was at the hobby shop (remember those) and it had a power cord attached and was plugged into an extension cord and being tested out back.
Thats exactly what I'm trying to do here (sort of), I'm like 2 years in on the project and I've only just begun to actually test the thing. https://github.com/castis/currant
You are right that this thing is going to be noisy as hell. I can say this without having heard it because basic physics makes hovering craft with little propellers impossible to make quiet. Welcome to the new world of a flying buzzsaw delivering your neighbor's toothpaste at 7 AM.
No wonder they chose to play classical music over this video.
If I’m working on a drone in my yard, surrounded by buildings, the noise has a direct line to a few people. If I put that drone at 200 feet, suddenly many more people are directly exposed to that noise. Imagine how loud a UPS truck would be within a 90° cone above your bedroom. Also, consider how many more people would be affected by that noise per delivery.
But to be fair, the frequencies are quite different.
The UPS truck that delivers to my block makes a bit more noise then the average car driving down my street, parks, the driver gets out of it, and spends a couple of minutes making >20 deliveries. A human carrying cardboard boxes does not make much noise. Neither does a powered-off truck... And it's not like UPS does domestic deliveries from the back of 20-wheeler rigs.
This is orders of magnitude less noise than 20 drones, coming and going, throughout the day. (Not to mention the ones passing overhead, to deliver to the next block down...)
Yeah, but if I have enough money/income (which is a big caveat, I know) then I can have some control over the location of the UPS truck by virtue of living someplace not too close to a road.
When was the last time a UPS truck drove over your house / apartment / etc?
Noise is my main concern with drone delivery networks. I have been playing with radio controlled aircraft for most of my life. I see drone delivery as inevitable, but living near a noisy drone delivery route could really lower quality of life for the people on the ground.