FAA authorizes Zipline to deliver commercial packages using drones
faa.gov
faa.gov
Every bit of volume pretty directly can knock some ICE usage off the road, and more importantly because batteries are integral to the process it's pretty amenable to be running purely on renewables.
That's a hell of "technology which can just plain make everything better" possibility.
And the other one is in active use.
Look forward to more of their successes.
Seems absurd when it's put like that. This is possibly something we'll look back on and struggle to comprehend how it was ever the go-to solution.
There's also the simple practical issue: self-driving cars can't navigate a complex crowded environment, whereas self-flying planes navigate a much simpler environment with many more regulatory controls on behavior.
[1] https://www.sustainablebusiness.com/2014/02/surprisingly-air...
It enables higher compression so you can get more power per unit of engine weight, but the fuel efficiency per gallon is lower.
And the lead is for the valves.
You can get more efficient planes but you can’t overcome the need to fight gravity at some point.
Some aircraft and definitely not drons for now.
So they should have much better efficiency than typical quadcopters
But the term commonly refers to all unmanned aerial vehicles.
For example a Global Hawk unmanned aircraft can fly 14,000 nautical miles and remain aloft for 42 hours. They are by definition very efficient. That is a drone.
On the other end of the spectrum The Spirit of Butts' Farm crossed the atlantic with 118 US fluid ounces (3.5 L) of fuel. It was flying for ~39 hour and 1,881.6 mi (3,028.1 km). That is about 2045 mile per gallon if I count it right. That is very efficient, and of course since the aircraft was unmanned it is a drone.
Wow - this is what they are planning to use to deliver packages?
> In fact, unless you drive a car that gets 33.8 gallons per mile (or carry more than one passenger), new airplanes coming off the assembly line are more fuel-efficient
Cars typically get about 0.03 gallons per mile, so it’s not even close.
Of course, that equation changes a bit once there are enough drones that noise pollution and collisions or other incidents become a real issue.
I think this is an good move by the FAA, but I also think that if one of these airplanes flew right into my head at full speed, I'd die.
However, much mini deliveries could be done with vehicles smaller than a full size car - and places where it is common you see lots of mopeds and similar.
People still can die to them.
I like these devices for use for medical supplies but do worry how polluted the skies could become when multiple companies are flying these things for standard packages.
Autopiloted is much easier than cars because air space is less crowded with less obstacles and extremely well controlled. Low flying delivery drones don't fall in that bucket.
I realize that this is a very rough calculation and that of course there would be large variations in flight frequency but no one else seems to be showing anything better.
I don't think I would want to live near one.
It's not hard to imagine how systems like that could be organized.
It's also important to consider how many road vehicle trips this would replace.
How many road trips would it replace? Drones capable of carrying a 5 kg payload over any distance are fairly big. The DJI Matrice 600 Pro for instance weighs 15 kg and is over a metre across. It has a hover time of only 18 minutes. Maximum speed is 65 kph so its round trip range is about 20 km.
A small electric van can easily carry a hundred such packages and has an empty weight of roughly one hundred times that of the drone.
Presumably the drones used for deliveries would have to be much more robust and have much longer ranges, both of which would make them heavier.
So 100 drones replace one van.
I'm sure there are huge holes in my analysis perhaps, you can improve it so that it shows that a substantial number of road trips would be replaced without filling the sky with drones.
Lots of CGI and notices about "simulated" though. The videos that appear to maybe be real show something that does have wings, but looks too small/light/thin to carry much around.
If they were to create a drone that can deliver arbitrary packages, then it needs to be able to lower a package safely. That's what those renders are, they show a typical multi-rotar drone with small wings. So it can stop and lower a package. I don't think there's any real footage of these yet.
The research you linked to doesn't seem to be saying that; it's claims are about the influence of interannual climate variation on timing of migration IIUC.
-- https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/103/2/BAMS-D...
Abstract For ∼100 years, the continental patterns of avian migration in North America have been described in the context of three or four primary flyways. This spatial compartmentalization often fails to adequately reflect a critical characterization of migration—phenology. This shortcoming has been partly due to the lack of reliable continental-scale data, a gap filled by our current study. Here, we leveraged unique radar-based data quantifying migration phenology and used an objective regionalization approach to introduce a new spatial framework that reflects interannual variability. Therefore, the resulting spatial classification is intrinsically different from the “flyway concept.” We identified two regions with distinct interannual variability of spring migration across the contiguous United States. This data-driven framework enabled us to explore the climatic cues affecting the interannual variability of migration phenology, “specific to each region” across North America. For example, our “two-region” approach allowed us to identify an east–west dipole pattern in migratory behavior linked to atmospheric Rossby waves. Also, we revealed that migration movements over the western United States were inversely related to interannual and low-frequency variability of regional temperature. A similar link, but weaker and only for interannual variability, was evident for the eastern region. However, this region was more strongly tied to climate teleconnections, particularly to the east Pacific–North Pacific (EP–NP) pattern. The results suggest that oceanic forcing in the tropical Pacific—through a chain of processes including Rossby wave trains—controls the climatic conditions, associated with bird migration over the eastern United States. Our spatial platform would facilitate better understanding of the mechanisms responsible for broadscale migration phenology and its potential future changes.
Though I did wonder how they'll cope in winter-weather. I can't imagine they'd do so well on snow/ice.
Those wheels look moderately impractical- larger wheels might have more clearance.
Reminds me that we had pneumatic tubes and miniature railways between buildings a century ago.
Also DPD piloted something similar in Milton Keynes and is now going to do it i ten towns in the UK: https://green.dpd.co.uk/news/16
But 'on the streets' in the real world, they're just targets for vandalism and theft.
So I'm just not getting the argument for why we can't trust humans to not vandalize or steal robots, especially internet-connected ones that constantly film their surroundings. I for one believe that just like we can learn to be civil to one another, and can also extend our civility to other species (e.g. we generally don't go around kicking dogs we see on the street), we can also be civil to robots.
Somewhere like Japan, with a strong cultural sense of societal cohesion and obligation, it could work.
But I live in a country where "societal cohesion" and "obligations" are considered communist propaganda and our constitution gives us the right to as many guns as we want in case we decide to hunt the government for sport.
I mean, this robot[0] make it all the way across the Netherlands and Germany, and only 300 miles into the US before getting beheaded.
[0]https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/03/us/hitchbot-robot-beheaded-ph...
Both are better than Garret in his 2007 Ford Explorer driving around town all day delivering timbits and tacos.
What’s more rude? Ordering takeout in bad weather, or not ordering takeout and indirectly punishing the delivery driver’s livelihood whenever the weather is bad..?
Delivery drivers are paid basically solely with your tips.
If you don't order, they don't make any money that day.
If you want to be nice, order that delivery, but tip more.
Bad weather is actually their favorite because people tip more.
Some Californians think that any weather at all is bad, and some midwesterners think “there’s no such thing as bad weather, only wrong clothing”.
I wouldn’t hesitate to order delivery if it were raining or snowing, but maybe in this world there are people who would still order delivery during a tornado warning (because that way they don’t have to risk driving during a tornado).
If it's genuinely life-threatening out, an actual tornado warning, then nobody's delivering in the first place. You can't order delivery even if you want.
It's up to the business and driver (or mayor ordering all non-essential vehicles off the road). Not you.
A van can hold thousands of 2-ounce packages, whereas a drone can hold one. If you look at it in terms of a one-package utilization rate, a van has over 100% rate, because it holds multiple packages, in fact it may have over a 1000% utilization rate using that metric.
You're essentially wasting tons of energy and resources getting very small packages delivered faster, but in urban setting there are no efficiencies here, quite the contrary.
Obviously it would take a lot longer than a direct flight, but the energy consumed would be far less.
Or, people should just make a sandwich.
But Uber eats and DoorDash are a reality, and I would pay someone to pick something up for me from Home Depot within the next hour. Services like Zipline have the potential to help out there.
I've long thought this. UPS isn't driving from the hub to my house to deliver a package, 90% of the incremental driving distance is the length of my driveway.
In a perfect world, yes. In reality, no. You would need a perfect storm of a huge wave of orders all to the same restaurant (or cluster of restaurants) to be delivered to the same neighborhood to ensure timely delivery so the food was hot and the customers were happy. In real life, you are almost guaranteed to never hit the ideal conditions.
Edit: After re-reading your comment, I’d agree with you for the non-food deliveries. My comment was obviously focused more on the UberEats use case.
A locomotive would be even more efficient over long distances, carrying 200,000,000 such packages. A containership even more so, carrying more than 20x the capacity of a big freight train, though I don't think they have the draft to fit up the drainage ditch behind my house. Nor do I have rails.
I jest, but the long tail is a real problem with such efficiency calculations.
You're right that it's never going to make sense to have migrating swarms of drones flying above the interstate carrying packages cross-country, but are real efficiencies here at the individual level:
https://www.cell.com/cms/attachment/4b8da4bb-42c2-4b91-baf2-...
Graphic from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2022.100569.
No, last mile delivery is made package by package. If you place 100 packages in a van and go delivering them, you will make 100 mostly independent trips, just carrying all the packages at once.
That's why those are very often done by motorcycle.
But indeed there is often a highly correlated trip segment. The Amazon's model of running a van into your neighborhood and distributing things there by drones may make sense. It doesn't make sense for Uber Eats business model, but it makes sense for Amazon.
Miniature zeppelins is where it’s at. Bouyancy to just below negative so very little energy needed to lift the device.
E-bike courriers are probably better still but drones are probably faster if you can make them work.
A lot depends on the delivery pattern, of course.
In some places, bikes are first-class citizens of the road, but in other places they're very much not respected and riding one is tantamount to suicide. Every single cyclist I know, when they meet another cyclist, immediately asks about gnarliest injuries and they compare scars like dogs sniffing each other's butts. And in the past 20 years I've lost more friends to cycling fatalities than any other cause of death.
I'll take the drones, thankyouverymuch.
And I live in such a lovely city. I can bike anywhere so quickly, so easily. Scooters & micromobility are abundant. But so many people (so many roommates over time) make a habit of ordering delivery, on such a regular basis. It's unfathomable to me: both the negative impact in general, and particularly here where it's so close & pleasant to go walk or bike around. It's such a huge expense to the world, and such a great enriching activity, getting a little walkabout.
Delivery apps just made people get food from a larger variety of places. Before them, you'd order from the pizzaria that's on the route home, and pick up up before jumping back on the subway. Or you'd eat at the diner on your block.
I do believe minimum wage should be set at the local living wage standard, and that companies like Uber are exploiting their workers through weak labour laws, but unless the market is much more tightly controlled, in a somewhat-free market (which is most of the world) economy, it is a tech issue.
Automating all work, sure. Removing people's mean of subsistance (a wage) and keeping the money for yourself, no. In a capitalistic society, technology only helps people if capitalists give away the product of (automated) labour, and that is not what is happening.
false. no one is forcing these people from taking those jobs (uber eats, grub hub, etc) at the agreed upon wages. tell me how somehow it would be better for those folks if these jobs didn't exist at all given that unemployment in the USA is incredibly low.
UBI is never going to happen
If this rate is too low, then that is what the welfare system is for. Forcing employers to pay a "living wage" for jobs that don't generate a "living wage's" economic value simply retards the economy and robs our children of a wealthier future.
Also low-paid worker sounds strictly better for employment than autonomous drone.
In general barring difficulty in leaving the house food delivery seems awfully optional.
That said for me delivering a package by bicycle+ train + bycycle is an option but it will always be more expensive unless you can stand long delivery times.
[1] https://www.flyzipline.com/newsroom/stories/research-insight...
Here in India a lot of delivery services moved to electric 2 wheelers
Typically I would expect a restaurant lunch in a major city in the US to cost $20-$40 per person after taxes and tip.[1] So, essentially $5,000 - $10,000/year. This was for people with salaries running from about $50,000 - $200,000 before income tax, so something like 7% - 20% of their after-tax income.
Making a lunch and bringing it instead should be less than half of that, especially if one makes extra food for dinner and brings the leftovers for lunch the next day, but I guess a lot of people actively dislike cooking for themselves.
A decent amount of tech workers also get dinner at restaurants nearly every day, which is of course even more expensive.
[1] Excluding inexpensive franchises like McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, because my coworkers typically did not get lunch at places like that.
Compared to everywhere else, Americans make more.
There was a time when ordering lunch was reserved for when you were already "on the town" shopping and the like.
Even debating what mode of transportation should be used seems to miss the larger issue and is even kind of gross to my mind.
I don’t see it ever happening, but I’m not even sure we need package delivery available for anything every day of the week. If we limited it to once per week for bulkier items (such as large furniture), we could reduce a lot of waste and traffic. Rather than deliver tiny lunches via drone, perhaps we should reconsider the greater idea of ordering objects. As someone without a car in a car-dependent city, it’s certainly on my mind.
And this doesn’t expand into societal implications of ordering everything without interacting with other humans. That’s perhaps a more interesting conversation!
For every proposed technology, we need desperately to ask: does this really make ecological sense?
Delivering necessities (e.g. medicine) to a remote township with a drone makes sense. Drone-drop pizzas do not.
Food delivery might be a better comparison, but 2 pizzas and a 2 liter soda is heavy enough to need a fairly massive drone.
And of course the obvious part where it removes hundreds of thousands of vans from already massively congested road traffic. The skies remain mostly unused.
Pollution wise you need to consider the lifecycle of a drone which is likely far worse than a van. Many drones are using very dirty small internal combustion engines. Safety wise replacing 1 van with 30+ heavy drones each traveling far more could easily favor the van.
Longer term it’s more debatable but we hand waving delivery drones as completely pollution free when we don’t know what from they would actually take is simply wishful thinking.
Zipline 2 has a 10 mile range and is VTOL though they’re aiming for a long wire for delivery rather than landing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipline_(drone_delivery_compan...
Zipline 1 does have an 50 mile range but it isn’t VTOL they use fixed wing and have a launching system and a net to catch drones. Packages are dropped at 100 feet while the drone is flying at high speed requiring a parachute and a 5 meter wide landing zone which makes it undesirable for large scale adoption.
That's very interesting. What are current (commercially viable) alternatives to electric drones?
The larger ones tend to have an electric generator to power the control surfaces, smaller drones tend to carry a battery for that and use the engine solely for forward propulsion.
This is for fixed-wing only, so it would apply to Zipline P1 but not P2, by the way. There have been some engine-over-electric setups to run multirotors from a single powerplant, but it's generally awful. It may or may not work for hybrid architectures like a quadplane, or a single-engine-VTOL like a tailsitter, all these things are in active development.
But that's still hundreds of kilograms.
No, let's instead try to game the superlinear scaling of power to weight in helicopters!
Most of the deliveries around the world are done by motorbikes though, not only that but they are done not one at a time but in big chunks. Which is not absurd and pretty good.
Where/when did this style arise?
Where else do people talk like this? What motivates this kind of speech?
The idea is that you want to say everything about the video within 10/15 seconds to make viewer interested.
Just like how you want that the title of HN story must be under 80 character, not 800. Do you start conversation with someone by saying 80 words then go on for 30 minute?
On TV, but it got out of fashion recently.
There's a Monty Python sketch about an island full of foreign news reporters that's quite illustrating.
It’s called “patronizing.” These people think they are more interesting and intelligent than they actually are and take on this air of pretentious lecturing.
TLDR: They use various ways of emphasizing words and adding variety to speech. It's almost exclusively done in videos where it's just a face talking to camera to try to make it attention grabbing.
They use Jon Stewart's Daily Show as a pre- YouTube example of someone using the same techniques for the same reasons.
ps - for those who are not subscribers: https://archive.ph/wkiWt
Essentially its a learned affectation to come off as approachable and unthreatening (see also Jimmy Fallon) to garner views. Read a "boring" technical article at Ars or watch this guy fumble around and be silly and give these practiced big smiles? A lot of people would rather watch a 20-30 minute video that's entertaining and lower information than read a 5 minute article thats denser.
Essentially this is blogspam in video form and it makes a lot of people very wealthy, so its not going away anytime soon.
As someone who loves the arts, but can't get into youtube personality culture, its just so crazy to me people watch these things. They're a bit infantlizing to me. "Oh you want to learn about these drones? Instead of proper sources here's some guy who will pretend to be your friend and do silly comedic things for you while explaining it to you on the 5th grade level." Umm ok.
The most positive thing I can say is that there are people out there who can't read well (or read English at all) or can't learn from reading well, so these videos can be seen as helping a vulnerable demographic in an accessibility-like way. It may also attract younger people who otherwise would never read an Ars or Hackaday or HN (or whomever) article because these outlets are just not super accessible to them (unknown site to them, written on a too low level, etc). And that these video personalities could be a stepping stone into better and deeper media.
Essentially media is a free capitalist market and people choose their media sources, via their own biases and limitations. If they want everything explained to them via a Jimmy Fallon impersonator, then it will happen. Eventually the lowest common denominator demands questionable gimmicks and the market is more than happy to oblige.
Great analysis though, "blogspam" in video form is a fantastic metaphor for the over produced algo gamey vids. (Perfect length to hit max ads, thumbnail, title, intro template, etc)
Well, Mark Rober's intended, primary audience (don't let youtube hear this) is 5th graders so I don't know what you expected.
They aren't trying to sell kiwico kits to 26 year olds you know.
Also HN isnt a 5th grader's venue, so its interesting how normalized it is posting children's media in adult spaces, probably because he doesn't come off as much more childish than most YT personalities.
I felt especially sorry for the people working at the Rwanda site just trying to do their jobs efficiently, while he mucks about being fake-excited about everything. There's almost an air of "smile and nod and hope he goes away soon" about it
I've noticed this among a lot of leftist/Liberal podcasting as well (like Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, lot of NPR presenters).
I don't understand it. it sounds unserious
All the 'hover over the house and winch down the package' aspects are still vaporware.
- Cruises at 80-120m and 60mph
- Max payload of 1.8kg
- 50 mile max delivery distance (although it can fly 190 mile on a single charge)
- Payload dropped by parachute from 25-30m into a 5m diameter landing zone.
More details on Wikipedia[1] and the Zipline site[2]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipline_(drone_delivery_comp...
From their website:
> Lowering from the body of the Platform 2 Zip, this little droid uses onboard perception to leave packages exactly where they're supposed to go, whether that's a doorstep or patio table.
[1] https://dronedj.com/2023/09/19/zipline-earns-faa-bvlos-exemp...
Zipline is an FAA-certificated Part 135 operator and will use its Sparrow drone to release the payload via parachute.
You could fail-safe this by adding parachute pyrotechnics which require an active command signal to not deploy: that way the worst case total electrical failure of a drone would immediately deploy chutes to slow it down.
This seems like a much more acceptable control then the failure mode of a car: which weighs 2 tons and contrary to popular belief only stays on roads by convention.
I assume given the 5m radius for drops they’re going to be operating in places that mostly have low density though. I’d also assume that they’d plan flight paths to be as safe as possible.
The words of a man who's never experienced rapid, unexpected, uncontrollable "drone flyaway". And yes, I have a modern, very capable drone and I'm not a complete idiot. Sometimes they just go... crazy.
Drones work until drone-specific AA is developed, and then it will be the same race we see between tanks and anti-tank weapons.
Drone specific AA will be very difficult.
And for now, anti-drone AA is difficult. But not unsolvable. Jamming, small caliber radar controlled AA guns. Point defense weapons can shoot down cruise missiles and even artillery shells. Applying the same principle at slower drones isn't that hard.
And I didn't make any demands, not sure how you woupd read that into my answers to a thread started with "dropping stuff from drones is an attack that cannot be countered". People didn't learn anything it seems, first tanks were obsolete, until Ukraine wanted every single one of them. Then modern AA made fighters and helicopters obsolete, only to be replaced by drones as the latest shit. Those arguments are just cheerleading whatever is en vogue and hyped.
Tanks being obsolete is… not clear. Tanks vs. western anti tank missiles and drones dropping grenades does feel like a terrible ROI but they are still useful. Russia doesn’t have these things at the same level of efficacy so tanks are perhaps more valuable for Ukraine to have.
Helicopters and fighters are in the same boat. They’re useful, but vulnerable and expensive. The thing about drones is they cost $200 to take out weapons that cost up to millions of dollars.
It is much harder to stop a small drone attacking a mobile position than it is to establish a large AA battery that defends against missiles. Missile AA is for protected largely stationary high strategic value targets. Drone AA has to be for small tactical level targets on the go. Way harder.
Offensive is much more difficult, as it needs to be coordinated with ground forces that can be impeded by mine fields. It is also easier for prepared defense lines to stop drones than it is for an offensive operation in the open to defend against them.
Ukraine vs Russia seems more asymmetric. For instance, Russia can be an existential threat to Ukraine, but the positions can not be easily reversed since Russia has nuclear weapons. While they wouldn't want to deploy them, they'd rather do that than lose Moscow.
Asymmetric warfare makes use of a great number of things, which wouldn't be very cost-effective in a battle of equals. For instance all the insurgents that use IEDs to harass checkpoints, would probably rather use factory made air-craft delivered ordinance.
Human-in-the-loop ethical concerns aside: a highly industrial power can fully automate the entire process and massively scale up from individual-pilot controlled prosumer drones.
Imagine a high-altitude loitering spotter-drone that autonomously identifies any tanks with open hatches and tasks smaller multirotor drones to precisely drop small munitions. You may take out an entire tank battalion for less than the cost of a couple of traditional air-to-surface missile without putting your personnel in harm's way. Future wars will be horrifying for infantry and ground vehicles.
And the safe zone does not start at 6m.
That's what really needs solving for mass drones to take off.
However this FAA approval is apparently for the Gen1 fixed wing plane (which is quieter than a drone anyway). Their Gen2 "drone" design is barely audible.
Also a Walmart in my area has blocked off part of its parking lot to launch 6 delivery drones. I’m going to miss the days of quiet skies.
But I don't see drone deliveries becoming a big thing outside of niche cases (e.g. medical supplies to remote locations with no easy road access). Payload capacity is very limited, wind/weather will ground them, and delivering to arbitrary homes/businesses (without dedicated landing/drop-off zones) isn't a solved problem. Then there's the safety/liability issues when they drones fail/crash. And the inevitability of Americans shooting guns at them.
The RC community has been pushing back on the regulations as it ads a lot of weight, expense, and complexity to drones and RC aircraft. There hasn't been any justification given by the FAA as to why these regulations are needed, adding to the confusion. Normally restrictions are put in place after an accident or some incident.
Drone logistics has its unique value proposition, primarily for medical transfers and emergency deliveries in remote areas. But thinking that flying drones from city to city, or inside the city, will replace or offset road logistics to deliver someone a book in 50 minutes is just stupid.
Does anyone here think Zipline will justify its crazy multi-billion valuation?
They’re literally building new technology
It will serve the niche market, though. But that's not a multibillion-dollar market with a bunch of competitors.
- silent propeller
- advanced computer vision
- miniaturised compute power
- precise civilian positioning systems
- batteries with good-enough densities
Of those, batteries are indeed the biggest blocker but let's not pretend there hasn't been any progress in the past 20 years.
Middle of cooking dinner and realize you are out of a couple ingredients and they can offer half hour delivery, sometimes it takes 45 minutes in the last city I lived in to get to Walmart. This service would be appealing.
This is going to appeal to those who are ultra busy and are willing to spend a little extra to get something delivered promptly without leaving their home.
Thing is, many societies are heading for demographic collapse or are already neck-deep in it (Japan). Even if it may be unprofitable now, we (as a society) need to invest serious amounts of money into automating a lot of unskilled labor, because otherwise we will run into disaster.
It's clearly the best thing that's ever happened in human history, so far.
I agree that that would be a big disruption, and it would take some time to adapt to a 150% increase in productivity.
Some temporary measures to make the adjustment might be needed.
But it would in the end be one of the best things that ever happened to humanity!
Where those aspects intersect is that it seems easier to build an autonomous flying vehicle than an autonomous road-going vehicle. Of course, drones have their own downsides for deliveries, including cost because of small payload.
Someone needs to carry the parcel from the road vehicle, in contrast to a drone that flies up to the customer's window, fire exit or whatever.
Nope ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssrk9bW2xBk
Drones are quite similar, actually: unless they can safely drop into your garden they'll need some sort of secure storage for you to get your parcel from. They are a number of companies working on this: Basically drone lands on top of a locker station and dumps its cargo into it, then you collect your package with a QR code or similar. Even if drones deliver on the roof of residential buildings I think something like that is needed to keep things safe and orderly.
I believe in autonomous drone delivery, which will probably be a reality one day. But the prerequisite for that is enormous advancement in battery technology. Nothing else matters if you can't fly a day or two without recharging.
Yes, and I've seen it work for the already existing road drones. You still need a human to be there swapping batteries but that one human can do the delivery work of probably 50 people based on how fast each swap was. When I toured they weren't at the scale where they were continuously replacing batteries so it was only about 10x at the time.
The economics that will make or break it is the lifetime cost of the drone, but it absolutely can replace humans.
But there are also people paying ~$10 per delivery for someone to bring them fast food. Where the driver goes directly from the restaurant to the customer, only carrying a single delivery. They might not need to carry more than 2kg.
Of course that depends on it being safe, reliable, legal, having nontrivial range with its full payload, and not damaging the product.
For drone delivery to compete with this on cost, it would need to have tens of thousands of drones available in any city. How much does a drone and the infrastructure to operate it cost?
Drones benefit from being better over longer distances in cities but otherwise, it’s hard to imagine how they can compete (on price) with a system that is already extremely efficient (at the expense of the people participating in it).
I'm 0.6 miles from Starbucks and right now, a coffee that costs $2.78 in store costs $12.22 if I get it delivered.
Of course rather than listing it as a $9.44 delivery fee they just add a few bucks to the price of each item, plus a few bucks small order fee, plus a few bucks service fee, plus a few bucks delivery fee. So I can see why customers might perceive it as costing less than $5.
multi-billion valuation
I think it was Uber, I remember reading that one of them would be profitable if they shut down their R&D department and focused on just ride sharing.
So in other words the hard part.
I personally believe this is the way forward, like in a star wars movie full of a plethora of "dumb" robots who have a specific work task, and are almost self sufficient. Like you have a robot that fix delivery drones, a robot that assembles them, and etc.
Drones will be also much better at avoiding obstacles, and they will be much more efficient than cars.
I am not really sure why there isn't more competition in this market. I believe they can build an autonomous delivery hub, and factory.
I wish them all the best.
This isn't progress, this is selling out our well-being and environment so that a few people can get rich.
But the delivery drones are just one aspect. We're also going to get these flying taxis and those are going to suck too. Why invest or pay to maintain roads or highways or to build and improve sidewalks, bike lanes, busses, or rail lines when you can just take your air taxi directly to your landing spot and make sure to avoid contact with any humans along the way.
A good lens that you can use to examine this technology is whether the drones and air taxis are additive or subtractive. Good technology tends to be subtractive, i.e. an iPhone replaced a lot of unnecessary things (of course it had some downsides). Sidewalks and bike lanes are another good example of subtractive technology.
Additive technology would be something like a heated seat subscription, or these air taxis and drones. We're not really improving anything we're doing today, we're just adding to it. It's like feature creep.
I'd also argue that more environmentally friendly, faster, potentially less expensive delivers are an improvement on what people are doing today.
Air taxis are very different from a regulatory perspective (greater safety requirements) and from an engineering perspective (much heavier payloads). I don't really see this authorization as evidence that they will be approved in the future.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. I anticipate that they will have an effect, and that effect may be reduced usage, but I don't envision any reason they will totally replace delivery drivers. More likely, they'll complement delivery drivers.
> I'd also argue that more environmentally friendly, faster, potentially less expensive delivers are an improvement on what people are doing today.
Faster deliveries already happened. Even faster deliveries for the routine stuff that you buy seems like a needless feature. I know I don't need a set of wine glasses the same day or same hour, and if I did then I'll just plan better or deal with it. Especially if the trade off for me enjoying my back patio or something involves watching humming drones wizzing buy all day so someone can get some cheap plastic stuff delivered to them an hour faster...
How do we get something faster, cheaper, and more environmentally friendly anyway? There's a trade-off somewhere. Maybe it's worth it, though I doubt it. It's hard to buy the environmental angle here when you could instead just reduce consumption. It seems more like greenwashing. Once you take away the environmental angle, you can see (or at least I do) how absurd the whole proposal of "drone delivery" really is.
There could be some other, fantastic innovations though that really are subtractive instead of additive. Generally speaking if we aren't eliminating the usage of 1 or more things though we should be skeptical of the technology.
Then I imagine the amount of drone’s required to replicate even a portion of these Amazon deliveries and it starts to make my head spin.
I can imagine some use cases for the drone deliveries but there is no way I can imagine it replacing much of the current delivery system.
Being noisy and annoying is just the very tip of the development iceberg here.
Can a delivery driver do some of this stuff today and so why haven't they done it yet? Sure. And idk, it'll just take time. The UAV platform is going to be a lot better for this kind of nuisance.
If lawn-care companies wanted to do targeted advertising based on how your lawn is looking, they can already use satellite imagery for that. They don't need drone cameras.
These drones also aren't going to fly by your window. They fly above the height of houses, trees, etc. - and they are too small ads you could see from that height
Companies have also had, for like a decade now, advertisements in places like malls with cameras to track engagement and how often people look at it and what number of people look at it.
Amazon Fresh also started sending me flyers in the mail after I visited a single time. I get them multiple times a week.
Delivery drones (which is part of the topic at hand) will absolutely fly by my window, otherwise how will they deliver the packages? Flying above my house still means I see the drones from my window.
Ads? Just beam images down or in the sky. Airplanes do this now during big sporting events and such. Buy a car! So and so are getting married! Etc.
Oh I can see it now. Coordinated drone ads where they'll fly over the sky and let me know it's Black Friday Only at Wal-Mart or I can get the best deal on a new Samsung OLED Smart TV now by scanning the drone QR code with my mobile phone!
Is there something about the geography or climate of these two places that made them the right choice to be the testbeds for this platform?
https://www.deseret.com/2022/10/4/23385813/drone-delivery-in...
Not sure the rotors would be optimal at that altitude though.
Walmartville might also be problematic with all those shotguns. Bird dogs may not be optimal at retrieving quadcopters. Would make a good SNL skit.
Where are you getting this? I don’t believe there’s any such named street or naming convention like this in Salt Lake. Google Maps appears to agree, since it can’t find that street.
There are addresses that Google reports using naming conventions from other cities, which makes things a little confusing. But locals use Cartesian coordinates for most addresses, it couldn’t be simpler, e.g., 1259 east 900 north (fake address, real naming convention).
If you're a robot. Imagine driving around at night before smartphone apps and trying to find a place.
As opposed to finding 'Oak Terrace', when a map book has 4 pages of 'Oak St' and its variants (a problem I ran into pre-GPS in Orlando)
One of Salt Lake’s defining features is how much easier addresses are than other cities. “Though the nomenclature may initially confuse new arrivals and visitors, most consider the grid system an aid to navigation.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Lake_City#Layout
I could imagine they won't be allowed to spread to any more cities due to actual or exaggerated noise complaints.
Every competitor has an incentive to delay them - and therefore there are lots of people who want to set up 'salt lake city quiet sky protest group'
I can't imagine the kind of clusterfuck these would cause in a sufficiently dense city. The sky blotted with these...
That's not based on actual experience.
And it isn't a useful service, IMO. It's another attempt to sell something that's currently shared (air-space, silence), while not offering benefits in a city. In remote areas, it could offer something, but I'm sure the big bucks are to be found in densely populated areas.
Silence isn't part of the tradeoff, since delivery trucks and vans are much louder. And I prefer giving up airspace to deliveries, since my kids aren't playing in the airspace.
Trying to get your wheelchair across the street when there's an Amazon van with its blinkers on blocking the curb cut on one side and two delivery robots in a stalemate in the other curb cut, above you a delivery drone gets confused by GPS signals bouncing off the skyscrapers and crashes into a freshly cleaned window, falling to the street beside you. Two thirds of this story is already happening, we'll have to see what new excitements drones can add to the mix.
My fire escape. Drones are perfect for vertical environments.
Most of these are small. It's already a challenge to navigate a Mini 3 Pro, or even a GoPro Karma (~1 kg) as it can jitter around quite a lot simply due to random wind.
Confined spaces are no bueno for drones
Show me the overlap between potential demand for drone delivery, on one hand, and people who have no porch, fire escape, balcony or window from which they can suspend a platform?
How many of those have a clear vertical space reaching to the sky?
Most balconies around me in a European capital have other balconies above them, all up to the roof, which would be the only suitable place for a drone to land. No fire escapes at 99% of the buildings here.
Suburban porches are covered. If you can land on a porch you can land on a balcony.
Fair enough, exempt luxury buildings with doormen and staff where they deliver packages to you anyway. Going off New York, San Francisco, Miami, London, Frankfurt, Roma, Napoli, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Montevideo, New Delhi, Bombay, Singapore, Taipei, Tokyo and Seoul, I think that covers it.
If a drone could gently drop items on my roof, that would be a real game changer for my life!
I suppose the future is everyone inside sound proofed bubbles because outside will be hell.
Might be "close enough to silent" for you, but cars are really loud. If this is in even the same league, this is too loud, especially as you just can't get a flat with windows pointed away from the drones.
In Rober's video the drone is not any less loud, it's just that the power in each frequency is smoothed out. In that, the total power is the same, just now more evenly distributed. We humans then perceive this as more quiet. The drone is essentially more akin to a white noise machine than a machine that buzzes in certain frequency bands.
For the curious, Tom Scott talks about the oddities of human hearing here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is_wu0VRIqQ
TLDR: Human hearing is more 'sensitive' to certain frequencies, perceiving them as louder despite being the same power.
Really happy for them on being approved to fly in the US.
Here's the episode - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eIxL0NnMko
Scan the sky for size 10 sneakers. Pull back the drawstring and BAM! Now you have shoes and a story to tell.
The factory must grow!
However when cycle lanes are put in, alongside them we could have delivery-bot lanes, maybe? Although if you have to install infrastructure then it might be as well to go full Futurama and have giant vacuum-delivery tubes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube#Historical_use
I remember seeing a big one of these built at the CCC Congress. It had some bugs but people were able to use it to send capsules all over the convention center. It was a cool steampunk alternate future kind of experience.
Seems kinda Jetsons to me.
"Uber was supposed to help traffic. It didn’t. Robotaxis will be even worse"
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/robota...
The basic gist was, convenience of ride-sharing / seduced us into over using cars. It was supposed to have the opposite effect
"...ride-hailing and ride-sharing could make our streets cleaner and more efficient. ... With minimal delays to passengers, we could match riders and reduce the size of New York City taxi fleets by 40%. More people could get around in fewer cars for less money. We could reduce car ownership, and free up curbs and parking lots for new uses"
but ... they did not take into account changes in human behavior. People stopped walking, using bicycles, etc...
"On average, ride-hailing trips generated far more traffic and 69% more carbon dioxide than the trips they displaced."
I think this is what will happen with these drone delivery services. As it becomes easier to order a box of bandaids and have it delivered in 4 minutes, people will change their behavior, we will be ordering more frequently one-off things from Walmart several times a week, and the sky will be filled with drones...
and it will be hell.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/robota...
The basic gist was, convenience of ride-sharing / seduced us into over using cars. It was supposed to have the opposite effect
"...ride-hailing and ride-sharing could make our streets cleaner and more efficient. ... With minimal delays to passengers, we could match riders and reduce the size of New York City taxi fleets by 40%. More people could get around in fewer cars for less money. We could reduce car ownership, and free up curbs and parking lots for new uses"
but ... they did not take into account changes in human behavior. People stopped walking, using bicycles, etc...
"On average, ride-hailing trips generated far more traffic and 69% more carbon dioxide than the trips they displaced."
I think this is what will happen with these drone delivery services. As it becomes easier to order a box of bandaids and have it delivered in 4 minutes, people will change their behavior, we will be ordering more frequently one-off things from Walmart several times a week, and the sky will be filled with drones...
and it will be hell.
People have a right to convenience and a better quality of life. Urban planners have a similarly flawed argument — tearing down highways will reduce traffic because everyone will take public transport. It merely forces the lower class and poor to suffer through public transit. The upper middle class, and similarly the tenured academics and policy wonks who came up with this sort of nonsensical arguments, never have to suffer the consequences of their own policies. It is a great thing in America that everyone can easily buy a car and enjoy the freedom. If cities want better traffic, then spend more money renovating or widening roads, not forcing poor people into crowded and uncomfortable public transport.
I don't wish to share my space/commute with drug addicts and literal human feces, I don't see why anyone in this world would prefer to do that, can you explain why since you prefer that?
> If cities want better traffic, spend more money renovating or widening roads...
In one system near me I've ridden I've ridden hundreds of times and seen one example of really bad behavior ever and the person was kicked off.
In another in a big city they suffer from far more problems but even there most trips are trouble free.
In this system the dominant method of payment is by using a RFID card one swipes. Credit cards are not accepted and few use cash as it stands. If you are poor the cards are free.
One could strongly tie cards to identity, deprecate cash, and ban people who commit crimes on transit. Note if you don't have an ID you have a fingerprint.
Oh looks like you were caught smoking fentanyl 3 times on the bus no ride for you. Refuse to get off get a free ride to jail and unpleasant detox.
Most of the trouble is literally 0.001% of riders. It's not like most bus riders are offensive drug addicts.
You have a very skewed version of what things should look like. Travel more!
If you spend an hour in literally any medium-sized European city you can see that public transport doesn't have to be like that given proper funding and a critical mass of ridership.
That's a pretty bold statement. Where is this right stated, and who guarantees it? Who do I go to if I feel my convenience and QoL isn't high enough?
Is this an absolute right that is realized at all costs? Even if my convenience affects the health and safety of others?
Widening roads just induces more driving.
https://twitter.com/alanthefisher/status/1491148250543386625
Making something more efficient makes it cheaper, unlocking new use cases and consumption by people who couldn’t afford it earlier. That’s what we call Jevons’ Paradox.
Jevons was worried that the UK would run out of coal entirely. This question, asked in 1865, is similar to the 20th century worry of Peak Oil.
> Are we wise in allowing the commerce of this country to rise beyond the point at which we can long maintain it?
Jevons, William Stanley. The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines. Macmillan and Co., 1865.
The Gutenberg press in the 14th century could have saved a lot of time spent copying books by hand. It did, but also triggered a Cambrian explosion of book publishing.
Most big US cities are designed to be incredibly hostile to anything but cars. The only reason that people weren't already taking taxis all the time is that the legacy taxi system is also incredibly unfriendly to users.
For instance, if my car can drive itself then I no longer need to park it near where I'm going and I no longer need a taxi to drive me to airport/station.
Regarding drone deliveries, the locations where it can be done safely is limited and there may be further legal restrictions if they cause a nuisance. We also need to see the cost, I doubt it will be worthwhile to order one-off small things often.
Emissions are getting irrelevant as EVs take over and electricity is generated by renewables.
Wait till people are accused of “crime” and are cut off from the airship delivery service.
> and it will be hell.
Imagine that the drones would need to follow quite stringent routes for safety and noise avoidance. Also imagine that (currently) a <50-pound drone flying at 300 feet overhead has a lower sound volume than a passing delivery truck. Actually, don't imagine; it's quite true.
Why do you think it will be hell?
Does that matter if I can IPO the "future of delivery" for billions? Corporations consistently show us they are willing to eat fines as "the cost of doing business", especially if its a means to eating all competition.
I like the idea of quiet, localised drone delivery over trucks, but I also lament a future that has me looking into the sky to see no birds, only Ama-line™ drones dragging TikTok banners behind them.
The future probably has no birds anyway - nor can I halt the drone delivery progress, so I guess it's not worth thinking about.
Unless there's a downside, not really. The downsides are often hidden from the IPO. But, let's go on.
> Corporations consistently show us they are willing to eat fines as "the cost of doing business", especially if its a means to eating all competition.
I concur with you. Being willing to eat fines, for just about any reason, is unethical in my opinion.
Being willing to destroy all competition is the opposite of my understanding of capitalism insomuch as I understand capitalism wants to encourage competition. And it's unfortunately very prevalent in societies that claim to love capitalism.
> I also lament a future that has me looking into the sky to see no birds, only Ama-line™ drones dragging TikTok banners behind them.
This is a valid complaint. I suggest that if you care about birds, with respect to drones, then you should become active in drone communities to determine the effects that drones have on birds. How do drone activities affect birds flying patterns or nesting habits? How do drones affect birds' food chains? Some birds have been known to have some level of intelligence and can mimic human behavior -- will birds mimic drone behavior?
> The future probably has no birds anyway - nor can I halt the drone delivery progress, so I guess it's not worth thinking about.
While I agree that, due to climate change, the future probably has far far fewer birds (perhaps even no birds), I think drone delivery is young enough that you can affect progress. There are government agencies that drone companies are beholden to; the FAA is certainly one of them, and the FAA (for things that fly) often works with the EPA (for things that affect the environment). There's plenty of avenues to affect the progress of drone delivery.
Without meaning to be snarky, what is your intent in this comment? I cant move the mountain that is US domestic policy from here, which will inevitably infect my country -- where it turns out I'm equally unable to effect policy (yes, I do vote, I have campaigned, things get pushed through anyway).
It just reads as "Well if you care so much about birds, why dont you get into drones", which feels almost like a non sequitur. The birds were here before me, and before the drones. I cant imagine there are any studies done on the wide spread integration of birds and drones, we wont get any until after we have hundreds of drones in the air at one time. Then we'll be treated to repeated NYT articles labeled "Where have all the birds gone?", discovering that, in fact birds were ok with 1 drone on the weekend but have suddenly freaked out when there are 100s/km^3 of airspace.
I sometimes see one or two drone pilots in summer, but largely they're non-existent here which might be the cause of some of my distaste for the idea of their proliferation. When they're here, they're loud and annoying (and scare my dog!). Probably I'm just being a curmudgeon.
We are on the ground. Fewer cars will be needed to deliver things.
I think this is a massive improvement and will finally use an underutilized resource we have.
And due to tech issues, drones falling out of the sky, smashing into houses, and dropping objects from height.. a small mass at high speed, hitting the head, can kill, blind, maim.
It's one thing to have planes, with maintenance schedules, flying. And those same planes are expensive, thus there is great incentive to not destroy them by accident. Not to mention, the build and quality control is generally high.
Now imagine endless "cheap is best" drones from China. A lost drone? Meh.
This is a disaster.
Safety will have to be engineered into these things(if it's not already) because it's enough for one high-profile accident to make the public lose trust and vote for banning them. The story is very much like with fully autonomous vehicles.
This attitude is why the planet is polluted and ecosystems are regularly destroyed. I wonder, is something else in the sky? Does the sky have a purpose beyond being a place where humans happen to not be?
That's known as "induced demand", and it's been known to exist in traffic since almost a century [1].
From the press release:
> The FAA authorized Zipline International, Inc., to deliver commercial packages around Salt Lake City and Bentonville, Arkansas, using drones that fly beyond the operator’s visual line of sight.
emphasis mine and
From the approval letters:
> Flight operations must minimize ground risk and not overfly the following, unless otherwise approved by the Administrator: Power plants, Open-air assemblies of people, Schools during times of operation (e.g., elementary, middle, high, preschool and daycare facilities), Moving vehicles, except transitory flight operations, Roadways or highways, except transitory flight operations, and Any other area deemed high risk by the operator during the flight route design process.
> For all current operations areas, and prior to conducting operations in a new area, the operator must complete a ground risk assessment and submit it to the FAA for acceptance.
> The operator must maintain a conflict management capability to ensure that the PIC is able to keep the UA clear of any manned aircraft and other UA.
> The operator may only conduct operations at a UA-to-PIC ratio of 1:1 unless otherwise authorized by the FAA.
> Flights under special visual flight rules (SVFR) or instrument flight rules (IFR) are not authorized.
There's lots and lots of stipulations here. So what's your concrete complaint?
Of course they did - it's inconvenient.
> On average, ride-hailing trips generated far more traffic and 69% more carbon dioxide than the trips they displaced.
Some points from the study that came up with that figure:
(Bottom line up front: electrified ride-sharing can lower emissions by 70% compared to driving a combustion car and is a good solution)
> A pooled ride-hailing trip shared between two passengers is similar in emissions to a private vehicle trip, and about 33 percent lower polluting than a non-pooled ride-hailing trip. Electrifying ride-hailing vehicles would dramatically improve the climate emissions of ride-hailing trips. An electric ride-hailing trip would cut emissions by about 50 percent compared to a private vehicle trip; a pooled, electric ride-hailing trip would lower emissions by nearly 70 percent compared to a private vehicle trip (or about 79 percent compared with a non-pooled ride-hailing trip).
> On average, bus and rail travel have lower carbon emissions than car travel in either a private vehicle or in a pooled or non-pooled ride-hailing vehicle. However, using ride-hailing to connect to transit can be a good low-carbon choice. For example, a pooled ride-hailing trip connecting to the train, where the ride-hailing trip is a quarter of the total trip length, can be more than 50 percent less polluting than a private vehicle trip.
IMHO, misplaced blame. Rather let us think as _Amazon_ is utterly a joke, because they sprayed infinite(in terms of plebs like me) cash into drone delivery and still didn't make much progress in the space. Google is not even in logistics business and drone doesn't make any sense for them.
> Yet almost every CS major at Stanford still stays up all night doing leetcode or whatever stupid thing they're doing to try to get a place there.
In long-term, nothing trumps comfortable money and the prestige that comes with the name "GOOGLE" on a CV and opening more useful doors later on, compared to Zipline, which could've been any one of the other thousands of drone startups that came and went silently and didn't turn up much. We don't live in an ideal world, something all of us should remember.
Another business Amazon retired, but a ton of start-ups still think is a good idea, is groccery deliveries.
I can already think of a friend off the top of my head who worked there. They will tell me their engineering work at Google is not even that impressive compared to her other technical accomplishments. Our industry doesn't seem to care and she gets immediate extra-prestige just from having "(ex-)Google" on her resume independent of her actual technical accomplishments at Google.
Those Stanford grads aren't dumb. They are reacting to the incentives of our entire industry and making a wise decision that favours their professional growth through accruing status and wealth - both resources which can catapult you to finally having what you need to go do "the thing" you actually want to do. Hence all the ex-Google startup founders.
It's about the money.
Work at a startup, and get paid meager table scraps to "follow your dreams" and "work on something meaningful." Watch all your friends become millionaires while you work 14 hours a day to afford name-brand ramen noodles.
Or, work in Big Tech, get paid an actual decent salary, clock out in 60 hours or less every week while getting every perk imaginable, and retire into the upper-middle class before 50 (or 40, or sometimes 30).
You misspelled 6.
....is that....meant to be good? As someone who works in "big tech" and works 37.5h a week I have no idea what kind of perk/money they would need to offer me to work 60 hours a week. I'm not sure that even exists - I like having a life outside of work.
Changing the world involved actually thinking for yourself. And that is exceptionally rare.
Edit: Downvoted immediately. What social commentary. Now I know what I’m saying is true: people hate it.