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Comment by programminggeek | Hacker News Reader

Like the aircraft carrier and aircraft, you could have a delivery vehicle that acted as a quadracopter platform to take the item from van to house over shorter distances.

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I'm imagining the code to plan the route of the autonomous truck as it accounts for travel time/range in and out for each delivery.

The truck never stops, optimizing its route for all the drones it has in the air.

Writing that code would be a pretty cool job.

Definitely. Time to start writing it now in time for the hardware to catch up!

It's probably been patented already.

Ugh. You say this as a joke, but I vote we come up with a list of features that could be cited as prior art and stick a hash of 'em into the BTC block chain.

I wasn't joking. This is how software patent creation works. Before something can be made in practice, make all the algorithms you might need to implement it.

I believe Intellectual Ventures has patented that business model. You'll be hearing from their drone soon.

Yeah, no matter how obvious something is, someone will probably be able to find a trivial variation of it to patent. I mean, if you have a Taco Copter, clearly a Burrito Copter is nonobvious. I wonder just how trivial they'd allow something like this. I mean it's obvious enough that you can adapt existing telemetry systems and collision avoidance algorithms to this activity, but I doubt the lawyers think it obvious.

If you think it's so obvious to implement the algorithm in discussion here, feel free to publish it openly and preempt future patent claims.

Oh, that's the thing. In a patent, you only have to describe the general idea. It's not like you put source code or anything useful.

But that's the problem: no matter how many variations of the obvious you list, they'll find something to patent.

I imagine much of the time the best optimization would end up being a single drone.

Yeah, with the van housing a system to swap battery packs between deliveries in densely populated areas.

Only in major urban areas where you see a UPS/Fedex truck literally go a block before stopping again would you likely see multiple drones.

But the bigger picture here is to expand what you order from Amazon. The eventual goal would be more along the lines of small singleton items you'd run to a convenience/drug/grocery store for.

Even after you account for a minimum price to make it worthwhile, that's many, many more deliveries than UPS/FedEx does.

Sorry, I was agreeing with you, I've seen pretty much that exact question asked when people talk about autonomous vehicles delivering packages and here we have a huge logistics company playing with the answer.

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