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.
Self-opening soup can
Just give it a tiny parachute
Operation Gumbo Drop
It’ll be in Amazon packaging.
Can of soup wrapped in a brown cardstock bag 👍🏼
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
For those of us who order one can of beer, please wish us luck when we go to open it
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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.
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
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.
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So if Amazon thinks they could do it themselves, and cheaper, that seems like a good reason for them to focus on it.
I still think it’s a gimmick, but them paying to outsource something is a reason to bring it in-house.
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.
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 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
And maybe that craft could have wheels instead of rotors to mitigate the rain/wind problems… i think we might be on to something here!
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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.
The problem is that the bigger and heavier the craft the higher it’s minimum drop height is going to be because it’s more dangerous and needs more clearance.
Obviously it also becomes much more costly to run.
Put a little parachute on the package to soften the fall! /s
That made me laugh… I was imagining a small parachute hooked up to a plasma TV 😲
The UK drone delivery does that
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.
If you factor in all the logistics and systems necessary to run the drone operations and all associated functions, is it likely to be much of a saving?
I could see something like this as useful for medical prescription delivery, but that comes with its own issues and dangers.
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
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.
And that’s not even getting into the point of how much easier and less illegal it is to snipe an Amazon drone out of the sky for its payload than it is to assault an Amazon delivery truck and driver. It may not be more common in the long run than porch pirates, because that’s also easy and low risk, but I 100% fully guarantee you our redneck population will be out in some capacity hunting for Christmas presents.
“In the land of the drones, the man with the t-shirt cannon is king.”
I’m not gonna lie, this had never occurred to me. But now that it has, it is 100% gonna be my hobby of the future
Bow hunting both gives the drone a sporting chance, and helps you soak in that Horizon Zero Dawn feel.
Instructions unclear, built air compressor powered blunderbuss
I’m setting up nets as we speak! Going to trawl the skies for goods
Places like Los Angeles are mostly SFH. Most areas are already loud as fuck from road noise, proximity to airports, etc. Nobody will notice a few drones.
If it becomes popular in LA, that’s pretty much definition of mainstream.
It is remarkable to me how tolerant as a society we have gotten to noise. We just accept that someone has a right to drive modified motorcycles at 3am with 8 of their buddies.
It isn’t legal (in US) and cops do occasionally set up decibel traps, especially in places frequently visited by motorcyclists, but I completely agree with you. Quiet nights outside of city feel strange now.
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We have Wing in Australia and gotta say getting small tech delivered or medicine by drone is very convenient. It gets lowered instead of dropped.
The drone planes in Africa delivering medical supplies are amazing.
I won’t say never, but when and how will drone delivery be more efficient than a truck?
Per package it’s more energy, it’s more risk, and the tech is harder.
To purchase a fleet of drones big enough will cost more than paying a driver for a long time still.
Pretty much everybody in this thread who is laughing at Amazon’s drones is thinking of drones as they are right now. But Amazon is not using drones because it’s a good idea now. They’re using drones now so they already have the experience and the setup when inevitable technical progress happens.
The drones might never work out or they might eventually work out, but this is exactly how Amazon got so big in the first place. They started selling books online when a lot of people still weren’t sure whether that could work and they started selling cloud computing almost ten years before anyone else thought to do that.
Fair, but the flying drone delivery in my opinion doesn’t scale up.
I think the real savings would be in something like a robot moving packages from the truck or a mobile base to the door.
Per package it’s more energy
How you figure? compared to point to point electrical energy costs compared to moving a truck mass around streets with constant stopping/starting?
It’s the same as a train, by moving bulk you reduce average costs. Plus drones have to stay in the air, and travel from their base for each package, whereas if a truck has two stops on a street it’s moving less distance.
Train isn’t doing point to point.
You’re gonna have to actually do the calculations before making claims.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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?
