Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjmorris | Hacker News Reader

I've been joking for awhile now that UPS/FedEx trucks could become 'aircraft carriers', carrying a set of drones along with the packages, using the drones for the 'last mile' of delivery.

View on HN

That's how the Protoss Postal Service does it!

Joking aside when Amazon's drone program first made news I thought they were going to make a deal with USPS to use the gazillion post office offices as drone bases. Guess it never went anywhere.

Lots of broad flat roofs on Whole Foods.

USPS is legally blocked from offering any services besides postal services, one of the reasons they're doing so bad among many, and this seems vaguely delivery but outside the bounds.

That’s not true at all. USPS offers notary services, passport services, money orders, and many other services besides.

The reason USPS is having financial troubles is because conservative extremists in the American government have put huge financial burdens on them like fully funding their medical plan 10 years in advance in a blatant attempt at bankrupting one of the few Federal agencies specifically enumerated in the Constitution so they can then sell this services to FedEx and UPS and make huge gains for shareholders.

It's actually a requirement to fund 75 years of retirement costs in 10 years ($75 billion).

And it was passed with broad bipartisan support. I wish people would stop repeating the canard about "conservative extremists" with respect to this law.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/15/postal-se...

> But the 2006 law also shifted the burden of paying for worker and retiree benefits entirely to the Postal Service. That came at the insistence of the Bush administration, Davis said.

Davis being the congressman who introduced the bill.

There's a lot of stuff in the PAEA bill that put that obligation on the USPS, just because the whole bill passed with support from both parties doesn't mean that the particular prepaid debt obligation isn't the work of "conservative extremists" the history of particular provisions is important. A lot of otherwise objectionable provisions get included at the threat of a filibuster from ideological groups.

They have a strict charter and are not free to go into whatever business they want though. They don't even control the price of stamps.

I love the name. Maybe will steal the name and start a startup called Protoss Postal Service.

This was my truck on Monday. Where should we put these dozens(?) of drones? https://imgur.com/a/wBn2Pfh

That amount of packages is not extraordinary, and in my car was more full today. I’m on lunch now, 166 stops down, 42 stops to go.

How many of the packages are smaller than a shoebox? How many are lighter than 5 pounds? Could drones doing this from a specialized place on top of the van save you some stops?

Plenty, and I see where you’re coming from, but in the end the amount of work would increase to fill any saved labor.

That's exactly what patent US9305280B1 [0] from Amazon describes!

I personally think this could work particularly well, maybe not with blimps but with trucks doing optimized routes and deploying drones for the last mile.

[0] https://patents.google.com/patent/US9305280B1/en

That's actually a great idea. I don't know why it hasn't been tried out (or if it has, why it didn't work out).

Probably issues with charging.

Super capacitor based drones would probably be the best outcome (if we could figure out how to harness the power)

Charging issues: The trucks could carry spare batteries and chargers.

If the drones spend a decent amount of time on the truck it doesn't need anything too exotic. You will need to outfit the trucks with beefy alternators/gensets though.

There are still several issues with this scheme. The drone needs to be autonomous enough to know when to take off, which partially involves knowing the trucks current and future route information. It also needs to be able to navigate safely in low level flight to the destination, and be able to safely drop the package off. The original prototype delivery required homeowners to build a small helipad in their back yard to get packages, which is impractical. The drone then needs to be able to fly back to the truck, knowing exactly where the truck is and where it will be in a few minutes and possibly land on a moving vehicle with enough precision to hook up the charging system and somehow select and attach the next package for delivery.

When you look into the details this is a horrendously complex system. Some of the tech isn't really there yet and the rest requires a whole elephant load of integration and testing. There are loads of things that can go wrong. The truck might get diverted around roadwork, or be in an accident, or there could be kids playing in the yard when the drone arrives with the package and nowhere safe to land, territorial birds may attack the drone, or the battery pack on the drone might fail and catch fire, a no-fly NOTAM may appear suddenly over your delivery area, or so on and so forth.

That's a really cool idea.

That's always been one of the primary plans for package delivery...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com