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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

My rural UPS guy variously rings the doorbell, leaves the package in the garage or even puts it in the back seat of a car parked in the driveway. I'm grateful for all these attempts; it keeps my packages out of the weather etc and is far better than a note on the door.

A drone can do none of these things. Perhaps if I had a 'drop box' the drone could drop the package in, with a ramp top that slid the package into a weather-resistant interior (like a public post office letter drop box - anybody remember those?) it could work.

So I imagine drone delivery will be initially restricted to registered clients (commercial/industrial) with special installed receiver boxes. Not a small win - many package deliveries are to commercial customers!

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I've always thought that standardized drone landing pads are the obvious and inevitable solution. For commercial addresses with a flat roof, this is rather easy. For many residential addresses it may be a little trickier. Most houses probably don't have a weather-proof area that doesn't require some machinery (e.g. a conveyor belt to move a landed package into a garage) or a tricky drone landing (e.g. a covered back porch).

A 'drop box' near the curb by the mailbox may be an acceptable solution.

I like your imagined scenario very much! It can be, essentially, a "helipad" designed for a drone landing and a "chute" to an interior staging area for sorting and whatnot. That post office letter drop box is a really functional and cool example.

As you pointed out, there are numerous avenues for customer support (putting the package in the garage without explicit instruction) that can be hashed out in the agreement between commercial customer and the delivery platform. It also could help with building a relationship and sharing liability in some ways.

In a commercial setting, the box could be on a roof with a chute to the mail room. No reason for it to be exposed in public that way.

Yeah that's kind of what I meant, sorry if not clear. What I meant by liability is that if the product delivery has a hiccup, it's sort of a shared understanding that the system should work 90%+ of the time, but when it doesn't, well, it happens.

Good news Edna, your new walker just arrived. The bad news is that there was a mix-up with the delivery instructions and you have to climb up to the roof to get it.

Sorry, we can't send someone out because we don't employ people. You are talking to a machine right now. The best we can do is have you put an order in to ship yourself to the roof of your house. We can then send our xl-drone to deliver you up there.

And you need a drone dog to attack the drone mailman. One which has a premium jump package installed. It's still not as satisfying as hearing the screams following the barking. The world is changing so fast.

On the other hand, a drone could get to you where you are right now. Enable the app on your phone and the drone will show up right outside. No need to give a street address at all. Just the city.

If you're willing to stand outside in the street for, oh, any time between 8AM and noon? Package delivery is notoriously annoying already. Drones that require in-person acceptance outside your building are not helping. Its a problem that needs solving, before drones can deliver anything.

Automation of individual package deliveries can remove exactly that problem.

Your phone pings you and drone says "We agreed 3pm. That's 5 minutes from now. Still good? (Yes/No). Yes. (4 mins 45 seconds later) drone says: "I'm waiting for you outside. Can you come out to meet me?"

Alternatively, invert the waiting process. Amazon agrees to a 24-hour period starting tomorrow during which I can demand a 15-minute delivery by pressing a button. For very high-volume items this period could be indefinite.

It remains to be seen if this is economically feasible and if we can tolerate hundreds or thousand of these things buzzing around. But you won't be waiting for the man all day.

Couldn't they just use weather proof packaging instead?

Folks probably aren't making drone-ready packages at this time. Have to deliver whatever goes on the truck.

Anyway the drop box idea is a way of securing the package vs just leaving it in the parking lot or whatever. A drone sure can't knock on the door and hand it over.

They could.

But one of the bad side effects of "free" delivery is a race to the bottom in quality. My neighborhood UPS guy is awesome -- he rings the doorbell, if it's raining he puts a bag around each box, if a box is heavy he'll bring it inside for my wife. The local Lasership folks (different ones every time) are far less awesome -- they just drop the box on the porch, not bothering to ring the doorbell, not bothering with weatherproofing. So we've had a couple of boxes soaked, even when my wife was home, because she didn't hear the delivery.

I'd pay a couple bucks more to get UPS over Lasership, but it's not easy for me to select that option with most web merchants.

Is there no such thing as "signed delivery" there? Almost every single thing I've ordered online where I live (South Africa), was delivered in-person. They would not leave the package until it's been signed for. If you're not there and there is no one else to sign for it, they will take it to the post-office for you to collect. And yes, this happens even with "free-delivery" online stores.

Heck, sometimes when import duties had to be paid upon delivery, they would stay upwards of 20+ minutes while I went to a nearby ATM. In those cases, they could just as easily have taken the package to the local post-office for collection.

It's up to the seller. If they insist on a signature then the delivery won't happen without one. But that doesn't happen much in my (nice, suburban, US) neighborhood. I guess package theft is rare enough that the extra cost of requiring a signature outweighs the extra risk of not.

I'm in SF and Amazon packages use Ontrac. Ontrac appears to use contractors that just have a sticker on the side of their car with the logo. In the last month alone I've had them forge multiple signatures + report a package as delivered when I've been home all day and nothing arrived. And other times they throw it a decent distance or put it in front and it's stolen within five minutes.

Amazon re-ships via UPS/other and it arrives acceptably. The worst UPS has done is not knock/ring and that's rare.

90%+ of my packages via Ontrac had forged signatures, misreported delivery statuses, not actually arriving, [...]

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