Amazon drone delivery WILL happen. This will be completely disruptive to how stuff is consumed. Amazon being able to reach any point in an urban environment from its outskirts, at any time of day, within minutes and at a cost of just cents, will completely change consumption patterns (at least for existing Amazon users).
Once something has such a strong financial implication, any other obstacle in its way is going to crumble (not to mention that the technology is mature enough today to perform this; the barrier is regulation, and that can change with enough money at stake).
The economics are definitely not there yet. The insurance alone would make it prohibitively expensive. Then you need a lot of infrastructure due to low range. Light drones also can't fly when it's too windy, too rainy, too cold. And they can only carry a very small subset of usual shipments (limited size and weight).
I see the drones as a last mile delivery solution. Rather than flying the drones all the way from the distribution centers to peoples' houses, they could drive their trucks out to your neighborhood, and then release a set of drones to deliver packages the 'last mile'. This would allow them to deliver a bunch of packages at once without the driver getting out of the truck, and larger packages could still be hand delivered for the time being.
Also, I'd imagine that the drones would be (remotely) human driven at least the first few times they drop off a package, so they can learn where to drop off the package (similar to how Google handles training their self driving cars). After that, they could drop it off automatically, but hand off control to a human if the environment looks too different.
I can imagine all the people complaining about how they have been waiting for three hours for an Amazon drone delivery while a hurricane rages on outside.
Those kind of drones are not the kind of drone that can deliver a package, unless that package can survive a ballistic delivery to the ground.
Sure, by shaping the drone into a winged vehicle you can get the payload capacity up and make it move quickly as it goes from waypoint to waypoint on a "delivery route", even in windy conditions. But now you can't deliver the package itself neatly onto the ground adjacent to obstacles like you could with a quadra-copter.
If someone can figure out a reusable payload delivery parachute or something like that with the ability to keep itself on course even in windy conditions to hit a drop point on the ground from a couple hundred feet up, and make it work with packaged goods the size of a small book or video game, then it has a chance.
Not sure what the deleted post is referencing, but Google is using a fixed-wing design. To deliver the package, you tilt the entire drone up to do VTOL. At this point you can lower the package. In theory, it will work and have higher efficiency than a multicopter design. I'm not sure whether or not Google has had any success with it.
The urban environment represents the greatest challenge.
For starters. "To your door" urban drone delivery would be nearly impossible as most urban dwellers live in condos, apartments or densely populated areas where landing or hovering presents real-world, safety, security and logistical concerns most likely impossible to overcome.
The best case urban scenario is Amazon "drop off points". Basically small Amazon stores strategically located throughout a city with designated landing zones for their drones and close proximity to the recipient - so the recipient (or the delivery person) only needs to walk a few blocks max.
In this scenario you're still looking at a "real person" to get the package to the door though.
"To your door" sub-urban and rural (the outskirts as you call it) in theory may be more doable as dwellings tend to have driveways, yards and space. However the challenges of urban still exist. And landing (hovering) on location, on private property adds greater complexity from a safety and legal perspective.
Amazon has an uphill battle to wage with regards to the legality, rules, regulations and safety of operating unmanned air vehicles over "built up areas" in general. Current pending and existing regulations lean towards flightpaths and fly-zones that ensure drones can land safely in the event of an emergency requiring immediate decent (eg. a crash landing).
This means flightpaths over built-up areas of cities and towns in general would be extremely expensive (funding, insurance, lobbying) and most likely impossible under today's regulations.
No matter how safe they're deemed, drones represent a hazard to persons and property, and as such they'll be highly regulated. Amazon won't be able to fly them anywhere, anytime soon. It will take time.
Now, with all that said, a couple years ago the FAA Modernization and Reform Act was signed, providing funding to the Federal Aviation Authority to establish safety rules that deal with all of the above. The funding as I mentioned has already begun ... to the tune of $60 billion or so.
We'll see how the FAA strikes a balance between corporate interest and public safety.
In the mean time Amazon Drone Delivery is mostly a marketing / PR tactic to generate interest and buzz. Strategic in the sense that, on the surface, it sounds like something the public would like to see. It's exciting! Progress! Get the public on your side and "fast-tracked regulation" becomes much more realistic.
> For starters. "To your door" urban drone delivery would be nearly impossible as most urban dwellers live in condos, apartments
Many such structures in densely-populated areas have large, flat, mostly-empty roofs. (Hell, some of the apartment buildings in my little urban area of ~40k people have flat roofs, as do most of the local dorms.)
And Amazon will co-ordinate the retrofitting of these roofs to allow safe and easy access?
Have you ever been up to a typical apartment or condo roof top? Sometimes there's a common area or party area - not suitable for leaving a pile of random packages though. Otherwise it's full of HVAC and utility stuff.
There's no way on earth my condo board would approve the costs involved in allowing residents up on the roof or having security collect packages from the roof. It's hard enough for security to deal with packages at the front door.
> And Amazon will co-ordinate the retrofitting of these roofs to allow safe and easy access?
Easy roof access is typically the default. Landlords sometimes cut off access and a shitstorm ensues. Lawyers sometimes get involved, since it's legally hairy to cut off access to previously-accessible common areas.
> Have you ever been up to a typical apartment or condo roof top?
Several, and you can examine thousands more for yourself on Google Maps, if you like. They're not, typically, "full" of anything. They're mostly empty space.
> Sometimes there's a common area or party area - not suitable for leaving a pile of random packages though.
I'm not sure why not, but even so, there seems little risk of there being a "pile". The whole point is delivery in 30 minutes. Why would you pay for 30-minute drone delivery if you weren't going to be there to pick it up soon after?
> There's no way on earth my condo board would approve the costs involved in allowing residents up on the roof.
What costs are you imagining?
> It's hard enough for security to deal with packages at the front door.
It eludes me why you think tenants picking up their own packages from a roof is more trouble than having security (which doesn't even exist in many such buildings) deal with it.
Ahh I guess you don't live in an area with RAIN and WINTER where anything not bolted down to the roof generally gets blown right off.
The costs are significant if there isn't a prebuilt common area (rooftop patio). Because of safety, accessibility and liability concerns. Sure it's a big flat space, and it may be accessible in case of emergency, but it wasn't designed for regular use. These surfaces are designed for HVAC, roofing material and drainage of rainwater.
You want a safe drop location for drones that's also resident accessible and safe?
You're going to have to retrofit the roof to meet spec. Even if you already have a rooftop patio. And that means condo board and / or property management approval.
I grew up in Washington and Oregon, west of the Cascades. And if you're ever in Taipei's Songshan or Xinyi districts during the monsoon and see a crazy white guy not using an umbrella, you've probably caught me on yet another foolishly-agreed-to business trip.
As an expert on being heavily peed on by the sky, I can assure you that rain does not easily or quickly penetrate things like the hard plastic containers Amazon Prime Air will be delivering items in. (I guess you never watched the video?)
> and WINTER where anything not bolted down to the roof generally gets blown right off
I'm in eastern Washington now, where our regular 60+mph storms are more of an autumn thing.
Tornadoes are fairly rare throughout Washington, but when they do happen, they are, of course, concentrated in spring and summer, like the one we suspect touched down on our property in western Washington in the 90s.
But regardless of the time of year, if the weather is that bad, the drone probably won't be flying.
> Sure it's a big flat space, and it may be accessible in case of emergency, but it wasn't designed for regular use.
They get regular use anyway.
> You're going to have to retrofit the roof to meet spec.
Any particular spec, or just a fuzzy concept that I'm to assume must exist somewhere to forbid this de minimis usage?
1. Safety: drones - multirotors, specifically - are very safe devices, inherently. They are incredibly simple (4-8 motors and no other moving parts). If they are dangerous, it's only because of lack of investment by the manufacturers to make mission critical hardware/software.
That's the next step in the drone ecosystem though, as commercial use is gaining traction (multirotors are barely 6 years old now, IIRC. Mission critical flight systems haven't had time to develop).
Furthermore, octocopters (8 motors, and there are variants with more) have built in redundancy (assuming a reasonably intelligent flight controller) against the loss of each motor.
2. Cost: An Amazon drone could be manufactured for few thousand dollars - $3k is the RETAIL COST of a DJI drone that can fly 10kg overall weight (drone, payload, batteries). That means at scale, and without retail margins, Amazon could make them for less than $10k, even if they are much larger and more sophisticated.
The only wearable is the battery, and these can do many cycles (500+) before needing replacement, when properly managed. Other than that, the cost of maintenance are simply nonexistent.
3. Flight time: Simply irrelevant on an urban delivery service. An off the shelf commercial drone today can fly 10kg AUW for 20 minutes easily, lets say 12 minutes if flying at 40km/h - that means it has a range of 8km (and that's basing on simple off the shelf stuff, not purpose built and optimized systems). Manhattan is 3.7km wide and 21km long, meaning that with a handful of automated battery replacement hubs you can cover the its entire span.
4. Fleets and carrying weight: These drones will fly non stop, carrying up to 10kg at each payload. That covers 95% of the typical Amazon order and probably 99.5% of the things that you need just this second. The drones will fly non stop - I can't imagine needing more than a few dozens to cover a large city.
Bottom line: the technology is definitely within reach; I'd argue it's there, just needing some rich commercial entity to tie all parts together, test and certify.
Nothing here awaits a scientific breakthrough to be made possible, and I'd say that technologically, it's easier (and probably safer) than self driving cars (which no one doubts).
I'm very doubtful of drone delivery until battery tech advances at least 10x.
In dense, built-up areas there is no space to land. You can't fly between buildings and land on a sidewalk in Manhattan, and where would you leave the package there?
In rural and suburban areas, where houses have backyards, the flight range starts to be a problem. Amazon isn't going to build a full warehouse every 5-10km, even "drone depots" seem doubtful with that density. With "drone depots" instead of proper warehouses, the packages would still have to be trucked in, so 1-2 day delivery instead of 1-2 hour delivery, and the only motivation would be cost saving over traditional mail carriers.
Perhaps if batteries become a lot more capable, then having drone depots every 20-50km in suburbia might end up profitable over paying for mail.
While I agree with you that space to land is an issue, in terms of trucking in packages to smaller depots, Amazon already does this in some markets like the UK, where it is investing heavily in regional depots and doing "first level" delivery from their large warehouses to the smaller depots themselves.
Here it depends on quite high population density in the regions they are putting depots, which still has the landing space issue, but e.g. their two London depots puts them within possible delivery distance of several million people with front or back gardens. A large proportion of the ones who don't have private gardens have communal spaces.
The bigger problem than where to land for me would be how to handle "handover" to their customer without ending up leaving packages in plain sight in areas where it's easy for someone to snatch it.
And what about signal jamming or drones being shot down? Not only for package theft, also to strip or steal the drones themselves? I'm really curious how robust this delivery method is against external manipulation and general human misbehavior.
Or say there's a defect - some structural damage - and a drone crashes or loses its 10 kg package into a front screen of a car driving on the interstate.
Honestly, I don't see a way this could work. Not because delivery by drone in densely populated areas is economically and technically unsound. Because of... other stuff.
The problem with drones is that they're insecure. People will shoot them down for fun, and even if they don't, whenever they land they'll have to leave their packages in places that are either insecure or exposed to the elements. If it really takes off, you will need ways to manage "drone traffic" and insurance will be extremely expensive.
To top it off, they will simply not work on most days in Northern Europe, where rain and strong winds are common. I think the evolution of airplanes (which "we" believed would soon replace cars, back in the '20s) showed the problems we will always have with flying: it's a messy affair at the best of times.
I applaud Amazon for its faith in robotics, but I'd argue that we're more likely to get self-driving vans (which will either carry a very relaxed delivery guy, or will let people like supers open van doors with a code), or other incremental disruptions, before we see a wide deployment of delivery drones.
I hear this a lot, along with comments about self-driving cars being unusable because 'people will run in front of them to make them stop', and I just don't get it. In what country would it be deemed legal and normal for people to shoot down drones? Do people take pot-shots at light aircraft? Why would people suddenly want to shhot at drones? The same with self-driving cars - people don't run into traffic to make human drivers stop, although they would certainly try their best not to run you over, so why would they start doing it with self-driving cars. I've also heard the argument that people will vandalise the cars, destroy the LIDAR sensors and so on, but yet we don't have spates of people throwinf paint over the windscreen of normal cars. I think it says more about the mentality of the commentors that about the peeibilities for automated vehicles, flying or driving.
I'm not sure it is really that big of a fear, but shooting at people is totally psychopathic. Random property damage happens WAY more often than random murder.
Shooting down a drone is like throwing a rock in a window or graffiti. In a lot of areas, those crimes are a huge problem.
> In what country would it be deemed legal and normal for people to shoot down drones? Do people take pot-shots at light aircraft? Why would people suddenly want to shhot at drones?
I don't think it would be at all routine. But I can imagine trouble-making adolescents doing that (here in the US). Probably wouldn't be make-or-break for drones. But it would be an interesting challenge for Amazon -- how can we retrieve this equipment and how can we investigate its attack/distinguish from part failures?
The security concern (for the drone and the contents) is a bit overblown to me. What about all those ATM bank machines in all sorts of "insecure" places? We've somehow figured out how to keep money inside a machine that is unattended. The amount of theft that occurs on those things is minuscule and banks put the cost of such theft into their profit calculations.
The Amazon drone won't take off unless you confirm in advance (using the app) being able to accept the package, and you need to enter a code at arrival for it to release it to you. I am sure the drone can call for help, and keep lots of video and other evidence of what happened to it.
Ultimately, Amazon just calculates the loss of 1/10000 drone packages into their profit calculations.
Yeah maybe it's not the same solution. But it's a solvable problem, I believe. I trust that the Amazon team had this conversation 2 years ago, and came to some conclusion that the risk was manageable. Would they send their lawyer to congress fighting FAA regulations if an 8-year-old kid with a pellet gun could knock one out of the sky?
> 1. Safety: drones - multirotors, specifically - are very safe devices, inherently.
Aside from that whole thing where they have a dozen or so whirling knife blades that could take off a body appendage, or the fact that one small power failure or an inflight impact with a bird or a wire turns them into 30 pound falling lethal skull crushing objects.
Yeah I heard that some kid once got hit by a bicycle, that's why those have been banned for years.
Oh, and right, I once bumped into someone in the street, I guess that's why they closed down the streets.
But yeah, things might possibly go wrong from time to time so best not to try. Giving up is always they best thing.
I'm pretty sure we have a century of training people/kids to stay off the roads because roads are dangerous. Flying drones /everywhere/, including your fenced in yard, makes /everywhere/ dangerous.
Yeah, my comment wasn't bashing drones. I think drones are great (outside government use) .... I just know Amazon well enough, and amazons business well enough to know this is a joke.
When I say it's a joke I'm not being pejorative.
Amazon regularly releases press releases and propaganda designed to make the company look good but that have nothing to do with its products or that aren't real initiatives. This is one of them. IT's purely propaganda.
you're making a lot of assumptions about the economics and quality advancements of control software in your response-- - you're assuming pie in the sky comes true.
Their drones could easily be $30k+ a pop, and if they crash, need maintenance, irretrievably fly out of range, or simply become targets of angry people wanting to break them... all problems frequently encountered with high grade hobbyist drones.... then their value vs. an employee is questionable.
Crucially we're not even talking about R&D efforts, insurance, regulatory clearing costs, and probably the biggest cost, legal mishaps - and I mean very serious lawsuits - even toy-like DJI Phantom drones can fall/ crash and kill people.
I could see drone delivery to rural areas... but urban areas I don't think it's feasible at all, at least not for a long while.
And anyway, driverless cars are happening. Why do you need a drone when the robo uber taxi had a robot arm in the boot and delivers packages during slow times of day?
Drones could be useful for a lot of things but if the problem is delivering heavy packages cheaply to places with road access, they are not a rational choice.
Just for comparison, I had phones (flip-phones, mind you) from Samsung, LG, and Motorola with NFC in 2006. We could use them at MCD's, 7-eleven, and a few other places. Fast-forward 9 years and there has been little uptake, except that there are phones actually available to people with NFC, and acceptance is more commonplace.
In general, people take much longer to adopt new technology than we would like to see.
If the basic drone delivery model were viable, it seems to me as if today it would be viable to have a Kozmo 2.0 sort of service in urban areas. It might have higher labor costs (not at all clear as you could use pretty low wage workers) but it would have a whole lot less capital requirements and we know how to do it today. I guess Amazon is doing this in a very limited way with Amazon Fresh.
Drones that don't accidentally kill toddlers and pets and create liability nightmares? Yes, considerably more expensive than a minimum wage delivery human.
But currently, delivery doesn't happen for anywhere near minimum wage. A fully-loaded UPS or FedEx driver probably costs $100k or close, and those trucks look pretty expensive...
Calculate how many drones you need to deliver just one truck worth of parcels. Keep in mind you need drones capable of flying across the city carrying heavy stuff. Even if you limit them to only light and small packages, there's still a range problem.
Somewhere along the way it seems people are forgetting everything that has to happen before that stuff is quad-coptered to your doorstep a few minutes after you (via clever marketing) determine you need something as quickly as possible.
The relentless march of consumerism will completely disrupt how things are consumed, but I am not sure making "getting stuff" so painlessly easy is great for humanity.
Am I the only one who can picture thieves shooting these things out of the skies and running off with the packages?
I guess it's no different than following the UPS truck and taking the package after they've left, but intercepting a drone farther away (say, over a field somewhere) is probably less conspicuous.
I suspect during transit, the drones will be hundreds of meters up (partially to mitigate risk of what you describe, and also to stay as out-of-sight as possible), so you're looking at shooting a small moving target hundreds of meters above you. Seems like a non-issue for the most part unless large numbers of highly trained snipers decide to become package thieves.
Once something has such a strong financial implication, any other obstacle in its way is going to crumble (not to mention that the technology is mature enough today to perform this; the barrier is regulation, and that can change with enough money at stake).