Amazon air

[PonoBill]

Pretty cool. I like the look-down object avoidance and the landing zone marker. Reasonable automation and payload. Coming soon to a neighborhood near you.

[SuppaTime]

I cannot see it being viable. It will only work within a short range of an Amazon warehouse, and there are only what, 11 or 12 of those in the US? And it requires an unobstructed landing pad which means it only will work in suburban areas. Probably does not fly in the rain or fog. Liability will be a big issue. Payload is limited in size and weight. Other than perhaps some high-cost "concierge" service, it just does not seem to make business sense.

[pdxmike]

Musicians' incomes could take a big hit if drones get picked up by the pizza delivery industry.

[PonoBill]

Last mile of delivery is the most expensive segment--28 percent of the total cost of standard delivery, and a much larger percentage for highly automated systems like Amazon.  Part of the system design is micro warehouses, probably totally automated, that receive a daily shipment and disperse packages of the appropriate size and weight.

It's a forward thinking experiment, but not that far forward. First rollout will be close to current warehouses, then they'll start building the micro warehouses. With a ten mile radius (more likely fifteen) you can cover most of an urban area like Portland. The micro warehouses will probably be prefabbed, container sized. Plop one down on the top deck of a parking garage, rent fifty feet around it for an exclusion zone. Service it with a driverless van dispatched from the larger warehouse locations. Or be primitive and have a driver.

Urban areas work fine--roof delivery, or porch, or right to hand. I can program my relatively primitive drones to precision land on a two foot spot, descending through a ten foot hole in tree cover, in 25 MPH wind. All automatically. And it doesn't have any object detection, just accelerometers, GPS and magnetometer. Core software is all open source (except DJI). Core hardware is open hardware.

Liability--trivial compared to 4000 pound truck driving through residential areas. Incremental cost of delivery--pennies. The thing is a robot. They run all day, fast recharging every time they land. You have to think differently about stuff like this. It's like micro-ag drones. they look too small to do anything, but they run 24/7 if necessary, recharging while their spray tank refills. Perfect solution for organic farming, where a little residue in a hired ag plane tank can make your entire crop fail testing. Super energy efficient, cheap, and multiuse. Look at the way people are 3d mapping large areas of land now--the best mapping is done with drones, completely automated.

People have a hard time adapting new tech to old. Really struck home to me while I was updating some light fixtures at my house. The first wave was screw in LEDs that look like light bulbs. But when a light bulb outlasts the fixture, why screw it in? All the outdoor floods at my house got replaced with integrated units that are sealed, clean, and give lovely light.

[Tom]

I'd buy something I don't need just to see it work.

[PonoBill]

Karma strikes again, I just crashed my camera drone shooting pictures of Ponohouse. Light crash and no damage, but all the same...  ...karma is a bitch. I foolishly set up all the failsafes because of the high wind. One I NEVER set is GPS lock lost, since it happens all the time and it's not a big deal if you're in sight of the drone. But I stupidly set it. Flew up to get a pano view of the ocean behind the house with the roof showing and to test shooting in 1440 and trimming to 1080P to get rid of the props. Thump, bam, bang. Tried to land. Unfortunately, the roof was in the way.

[stoneaxe]

One thing they are going to need to do if we are going to have these things flying all around is to get the props stealthy....that incessant whining is going to increase the sales of shotguns.

[PonoBill]

One thing they are going to need to do if we are going to have these things flying all around is to get the props stealthy....that incessant whining is going to increase the sales of shotguns.

there's work being done on quieting props. My new drone design uses ducted fans, which are a bit quieter and lower pitched. Altitude helps greatly. Even 200 feet makes a standard drone pretty quiet. using a wing for lift helps noise and range both. I have a pusher prop FPV drone I'm screwing with that does 70 MPH very quietly. I expect to see morphing wing lengths. I think my new design will be pretty quiet in hybrid wing mode. We'll see, it's easy to make claims when it's a pile of parts and some drawings.

[Weasels wake]

I never trust anything that is called a "failsafe".

[SuppaTime]

Liability--trivial compared to 4000 pound truck driving through residential areas. Incremental cost of delivery--pennies. The thing is a robot.

The one thing the 4k lb truck has going for it is that it is 100 year old technology. It travels on pre-defined paths, there are rules of engagement between it and humans and it and other vehicles, and (currently) it is human piloted. And it is constrained to 2 dimensional motion. We are socialized to understand the behavior of cars and how to avoid problems. We are not at all socialized to expect things to drop quietly out of the sky. If this is technology that will stay with us, we will figure it out but I imagine there will be some lessons learned and some rules/oversight put in place. But meanwhile the torte lawyers will be licking their chops; Amazon has the proverbial deep pockets.

[pdxmike]

Liability--trivial compared to 4000 pound truck driving through residential areas. Incremental cost of delivery--pennies. The thing is a robot.

The one thing the 4k lb truck has going for it is that it is 100 year old technology. It travels on pre-defined paths, there are rules of engagement between it and humans and it and other vehicles, and (currently) it is human piloted. And it is constrained to 2 dimensional motion. We are socialized to understand the behavior of cars and how to avoid problems. We are not at all socialized to expect things to drop quietly out of the sky. If this is technology that will stay with us, we will figure it out but I imagine there will be some lessons learned and some rules/oversight put in place. But meanwhile the torte lawyers will be licking their chops; Amazon has the proverbial deep pockets.

Maybe pretty soon that delivery truck won't have anyone driving it, either.

One big difference that your comments make me think about is that there must be hundreds of accidents each year involving UPS trucks delivering Amazon stuff, and nobody cares.  But if one Amazon drone hits something, it'll be national news.

In any event, the possibilities for drones for delivery and far more are pretty amazing. 

[PonoBill]

Absolutely true SUPPA. Bezos probably doesn't care. He figures he's paying all those damned lawyers anyway.

[spookini]

I'll repeat what I said in 1995:
"Selling books on the internet?  Stupidest idea I've ever heard.  It'll never work!!"

[Adolfo]

This is a bit off topic, but Bill’s comments about the capabilities of the drones, and the recent events in Paris, got me thinking.
I can only imagine the kind of problem these gadgets are for the Secret Service and other security agencies around the world.
From what was said here, it looks like it would be quite simple for a terrorist, to buy a drone, load it with explosives, and send it flying to the gps coordinates of any outdoor location where the president, the pope, or whoever his target is.
I guess that it would be almost impossible for the bodyguards to shoot down one of those things flying quietly at 70 mph close to the trees or buildings. Once you see it, it’s already there.
What do you drones experts think? How do they manage that risk?

[PonoBill]

It's feasible and hard to protect against. As long as the GPS is working an autonomous drone can fly to a predetermined location and carry a few pounds of payload. There are easier ways, but it would be news, and that's what counts in this weird world. New tech = new threats. I'm kind of surprised nothing nasty has happened yet. They can easily be the poor man's cruise missile. More likely to be an autonomous winged plane than a multicopter. Fast, long range, higher payload. Of course the same case can be made for directly controlled or FPV-controlled RC planes.

Of course arising tech threats cause arising countermeasures, but they usually lag behind. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if countermeasures are already quietly deployed. Won't stay quiet long, there aren't many secrets held by more than two people in a connected world.