Here in the UK drones have been used to deliver medical supplies and mail to the Isles of Scilly [1] (south west tip of Britain) and Isle of Wight [2] ('big' island on the south coast).
Essentially these are operated like planes but at a fraction of the cost.
flyzipline is so cool! I saw an AMA they did on reddit a while ago and their tech for the thing landing where it hooks onto the the wire is really neat! https://youtu.be/jEbRVNxL44c?t=284
Yeah, there are clearly cases where you don't have an easy way today to take a package from point A to a relatively nearby point B.
But it's really hard for me to imagine what delivery problem drones solved for the average Amazon package. At first it really seemed like a PR stunt but, by every indication, Bezos was actually serious about it. Which I honestly don't get.
As with everything, the buzzkill is regulatory and administrative rather than technical. We could easily make drone delivery a thing but the paperwork will kill it.
Regulating safety and noise are not a buzzkill. They are essential in preventing corporations, like most regulation, from killing people.
Tesla's autopilot is the best example that the hurdles are not regulatory in nature, no matter what musk is trying to tell us.
As of now, these machines will kill people on the regular. Even in situations that a human could handle. And that's the bar we're setting and I'm glad we do so.
Edit: I know that people are killing people on the regular in situations that a machine could handle. And introducing this stuff as safety systems (like autonomous emergency breaking) is not hindered by regulation.
The main way you reduce traffic fatalities, is by desgining streets and roads in a way that increases safety for all users.
One of the most effective ways is to get as many people to use something other than cars for transportation. You do that by making cycling, walking and public transport faster and saver.
Absolutely. If you want cars to go 30kph in a residential zone, you cannot make a straight, four-lane street and plonk a round sign with a red border saying "30". You need to make a narrow street with bumps and/or curves to make it physically impossible for cars to drive at unsafe speeds (and in the process make most of that space walkable/cyclable and safe for people.
As a pedestrian I am terrified by streets with occlusions and random obstructions in the name of traffic calming. There's a road in Oxford with build-out with a tree in the middle of it. You can't see cars coming and they can't see me. Same goes for removing lines from the road. I'd rather cars knew where they stand and focus on what's important like looking out for other road users.
I've always thought it was a perverse conclusion that the way to make someone operate heavy machinery more safely is to increase cognitive load of the people operating them.
Why not have a the straight roads you describe, with rigid automatic enforcement and penalities that take dangerous drivers off the road? And then put in place infrastructure to make sure that not driving a car is a viable option, so that stricter enforcement has public support. I see this option as a self-reinforcing route to reducing car use.
>I've always thought it was a perverse conclusion that the way to make someone operate heavy machinery more safely is to increase cognitive load of the people operating them.
But the catch is that people doing things optimize for static cognitive load. In practice this means slowing down so "stuff" that demands thinking happens less readily when other things take up brain cycles. So you can get them to drive slower by adding "stuff" to the road. There are right and wrong ways to do this. Generally you try not to limit visibility.
Remember, the goal is safer, not slower. And slower is just a crude proxy for that. With big multi-lane roads your best bet is generally to try and normalize traffic speeds or segregate traffic based on speed (truck lanes, bike lanes, sidewalks, etc).
>Why not have a the straight roads you describe, with rigid automatic enforcement and penalities that take dangerous drivers off the road?
Because in a democracy with even enforcement they vote out the people who implemented such a system and with uneven enforcement it just turns into a system of extracting revenue from whichever groups nobody cares about. Orwellian crap like that simply doesn't fly in most of the world.
On the other side of this: there's a residential street I cross rather frequently in California which is a straight road with good visibility, and this being California, both unsignalled crossings and a 35mph speed limit. Everyone drives at or above 35mph, and almost no one yields for pedestrians at cross walks despite all the yield to pedestrian signs that are clearly visible. I've seen people wait for several minutes afraid to cross; I've had one driver turning right onto the road run into me while I was crossing at a crosswalk, despite their stopping and presumably checking the road before turning; and I've frequently seen cars have to swerve or heavily brake in order to avoid running into the cars that have yielded to let pedestrians cross, despite those cars being quite clearly stopped and visible.
In all my experience with high-visibility roads, even though you'd expect people to be better able to pay attention to everything on road with good visibility and clear markings, they actually seem much worse in those conditions. And given the ways in which they are worse, it's not clear how automatic enforcement would work; speed limits and traffic signals can be enforced, and perhaps crosswalks, with cameras, but often regulations seem focused on banning, rather than encouraging, this sort of enforcement.
Obstacles are only one of the ways you can calm traffic.
Planting trees near the streets, narrower lanes, speed humps, roundabouts are all measures with a proven record that they improve safety.
Crossings should also be one lane at a time.
> In all my experience with high-visibility roads, even though you'd expect people to be better able to pay attention to everything on road with good visibility and clear markings, they actually seem much worse in those conditions
This is nothing new. You shouldn't design a street like a road. You will end up with something called a stroad, that is bad at both beeing a street(a place where you can live, shop and whatever) and a road(something that connects two places)
> You shouldn't design a street like a road. You will end up with something called a stroad, that is bad at both beeing a street(a place where you can live, shop and whatever) and a road(something that connects two places)
No idea if that is universally true, but I feel like most people here (in Germany) have a lot of respect for red lights. It's not unusual to see cars waiting at a red light in the middle of nowhere.
Crosswalks with traffic lights and speed cameras seems like such a self-evident solution to this. That doesn't seem any more authoritarian or heavy-handed than literally digging up the roads to make them more miserable to use.
(Also, turn-on-red is such a weird idea. Especially as, from the sound of it, the rules vary from locale to locale.)
Regulatory compliance is, in many areas, a major cost of development. Sometimes the largest. Much of the regulation is in form, not function. Comply with box ticking and you pass, regardless of whether the product is safe in reality or not.
If regulation was focused on function it would be less expensive and yield better results for society.
I wonder which regulation you're referring to. Most ticked boxes I can think of are indeed of the "does not kill a certain kind of person"-kind, or of the "can be used by a certain type of person"-kind.
And of course, regulation can not cover every case. And if it turns out to be a problem, we can cover the additional cases. This way (in Europe at least) we gradually require cars to be safer for passengers and the environment.
I think GP is right that there's plenty of "form, not function" regulation - of the form, "must be no longer than X / no heavier than Y", etc.
But I think GP is wrong in considering this to be a problem. Rules may be expressed in a non-functional way, but that's often just a way to embody functional rules in a heuristic that doesn't require expertise to apply.
For a computing example, you may have a processing algorithm that has a tendency to explode in computational complexity on some datasets, because of complicated algorithmic reasons. Instead of explaining the exact problem to users, most of whom will not be able to understand it, you could determine that the failure mode is very unlikely to happen for smaller datasets, and just say "the input should be no larger than 10MB in size".
Other reason for "form, not function" is coordination - there may be many good ways to do something, but all of them require everyone to do the same thing. So it makes sense to pick a reasonable default and tell everyone to stick to it.
> If regulation was focused on function it would be less expensive and yield better results for society.
... and that would actually require that those in charge of regulations would be technical enough to understand the complexities involved. If you're that good with technical matters and can confidently reason about the wider second- and third-order effects, you are likely to have a bright - and better compensated - future in the industry at large.
If you are a regulator, you have to confront two facts. 1) that the most competent will either never be available or will leave at the first opportunity; and 2) that box-ticking is much easier to measure.
In the end, you have to ask yourself who are you left with?
Having 10-30kg high-speed flying machines, built by the lowest bidder and operated by companies that like to move fast and break things, being hurled around above densely populated areas full of squishy people and car traffic... how long do you think it will take before a first fatality? Do you want to live in constant fear of getting hit in the head by a low-flying brick?
No, a thick regulatory straitjacket is the only thing that can enable drone delivery in cities. But then, there's little point to even do that, until the noise issues are resolved.
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On a related (and likely just as improbable) note, perhaps cities should start treating delivery as another municipal utility. Right now, most houses and apartments in a typical city are fitted with pipes that bring in water, gas and fresh air, and take away sewage and stale air. I can envision another utility - a "package pipe" - a conceptual blend between old-school pneumatic tubes and parcel sorters. Imagine each apartment having an outlet sized for a standardized container[0], through which packages could be sent and received. I bet it could cover upwards of 90% of delivery needs of any town - most things people send would fit, larger orders could be split into multiple containers, and bulkier things would be delivered by trucks on-demand.
An installation like this would deliver all the benefits and solve all the problems of in-city drone delivery, cheaper, safer, better, and without any of the noise issues.
The obvious drawback would be the costs of building it up and maintaining it. Someone would need to do a calculation, but I suspect it could be paid for the same way other utilities are (small fixed payment for access + pay per use + whatever other bullshit business shenanigans electricity providers usually engage in). Looking at the cities I've been in, most existing buildings could be retrofitted with it as an external attachment (imagine an external lift going to every apartment). The big problem I envision is routing the inter-building segments of the pipeline - it would likely have to be above ground due to size, and thus expose it to the usual problem of landowners trying to extract as much money as they can from the public to let the project go through their plot.
But hey, one can dream :).
(My bigger dream is that one day, we'll all have something resembling a Star Trek matter replicator, perhaps in a form of sophisticated 3D printer fed from a municipal "matter stream" supply.)
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[0] - Say, UPS 10kg - "16.5in x 13.25in x 10.75in (42cm x 34cm x 27cm); weight limit 22lbs/10kg", or UPS 25kg - "19.75in x 17.75in x 13.25in (50cm x 45cm x 34cm); weight limit 55lbs/25kg". Via https://www.ups.com/us/en/shipping/create/package-type-help.....
> perhaps cities should start treating delivery as another municipal utility
This used to be called a postal service.
I look forward to the jurisdiction fights over city-run package delivery; I expect Fedex to make substantial donations to state legislatures to have it banned, as happened for city-level broadband.
> On a related (and likely just as improbable) note, perhaps cities should start treating delivery as another municipal utility.
Hmm, or maybe national governments should step in and provide this as a subsidized basic service to everyone. It could work for all kinds of post, not just packages. And we could go to great lengths to make it work also across borders! I suggest we call it something like a public postal service.
But here I was thinking about technology and logistics. In-city drone-based delivery promises features that neither public nor private delivery services can... deliver ( :) ). The package stream utility idea promises those same features and more, without the drawbacks of having fleets of lawnmower/brick hybrids zipping around everyone's heads.
Private companies deliver network services "better, faster, and cheaper" by cherry-picking the economically-viable aspects of service, and leaving the noneconomic segments to either the public sector or to be unserved at all.
Universal service --- whether telegraph, rail, telephone, air, postal service, or data networking --- doesn't have that option. It serves both the dense, high-margin zones and the low-density, low-value outlying regions, because it has the interest of the common weal as a whole, not merely profit.
Worse, the private sector then attempts to change legislation and regulation to impose greater burdens on the public-sector services they compete with (as with USPS pension liability funding obligations).
Government-run postal services are tremendously efficient, effective, fast, and reliable ... at least until they became actively sabotaged from within.
Much better than 2,000-4,000kg driving machines being operated at street level by the people willing to do the work for the lowest pay.
These machines kill thousands of people every year. This method of delivery is also very costly relative to autonomous drones, making a huge number of goods inaccessible to millions of people.
> Much better than 2,000-4,000kg driving machines being operated at street level by the people willing to do the work for the lowest pay.
No, it's not much better. Cars may be heavier, but they're constrained in their movements. They (mostly) follow the road network. It's easier to keep track of them, as you only have to scan the 360° plane around you. A drone could hit you anywhere, from any angle, so you have to pay attention to the whole half-sphere around you.
Additionally, cars are already here, and delivery services are only a small fraction of car traffic. Drone delivery will not displace any significant amount of cars from the streets, so drones will have to operate alongside car traffic. And I can't think of a better way for a civilian drone to cause large amounts of damage than crashing into traffic.
And, of course, car transportation is already in a regulatory straitjacket - one that was built gradually over the past century, rule by rule, one fatality at a time. It would be wise to not go through the same process with drones.
Many years ago I proposed to my friend we should start the work on anti-drone technology, and went through the various technical means of doing so, but never followed through. I think the best work these days on topic is probably focused emp bursts. Regardless, we should all consider how we would track drones in real time if we wanted.
A car travels at grade, crossing numerous pedestrian paths. You need to cross streets that cars use. You do not need to cross flight paths that drones use. A drone can fail and land at grade, yes, but that's a major failure, whereas it only takes one misstep to walk into oncoming traffic.
If you accept regular drone accidents involving buildings, people, animals, vehicles and perhaps even aircraft, sure. I know regulations are heavy but self-piloted craft can do really weird things when they think they're right.
It's no wonder the difficult part was when the drones came in to land. That one washing line that's hard to spot, the overjoyed dog jumping up at what he thinks is a new toy, that grass field that was actually an overgrown pond...
flyzipline has been successfully doing drone delivery in Africa for a while. [2]
There's a need a huge role that could be filled.
However small drones zipping around your neighborhood dropping off tacos? I don't think so. Not any day soon.
[1] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/41838/drone-makes-firs... [2] https://flyzipline.com