EPTAnyway, he says that you have to have a pretty damn big and expensive machine to be able to deal with winds above 40 mph. We're talking multiple tens of thousands, and those kinds of machines can injure and kill people. Obviously that's nothing like what we see in the video but the point is, those little drones can only reliably fly on calm weather days.
Amazon experimenting with delivery drones - Page 5
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Djzapz
Canada10681 Posts
Anyway, he says that you have to have a pretty damn big and expensive machine to be able to deal with winds above 40 mph. We're talking multiple tens of thousands, and those kinds of machines can injure and kill people. Obviously that's nothing like what we see in the video but the point is, those little drones can only reliably fly on calm weather days. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland26134 Posts
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Jibba
United States22883 Posts
On December 03 2013 11:50 Wombat_NI wrote: I don't really get the 'why' in its current form, but it's pretty cool tech. The 'why' in its current form is that they got a 60 Minutes news story that everyone is talking about, right in the middle of holiday shopping season. The longterm 'why' is that, as expensive as drones are, so are delivery drivers and trucks, as is operating through a third party and the third party's limitations (as they currently do with UPS.) The other benefit is that as difficult as it is for Amazon, it's even more difficult for their competitors. | ||
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calgar
United States1277 Posts
Original article at: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/a-drone-scholar-answers-the-big-questions-about-amazons-plans/282009/ After Amazon's Jeff Bezos announced that his company wanted to deliver packages with small unmanned aerial vehicles, many people have questioned the viability and wisdom of the idea. Yesterday, we got one optimistic perspective from Andreas Raptopoulos, an entrepreneur who founded Matternet, which is developing drone-delivery technology. But there are many other ways to answer the questions that I posed to Raptopoulos. So, today, we bring you an interview with the University of Washington's Ryan Calo, who has become a leading authority on the ethical and policy implications of emerging technologies. Specifically, he's focused on the problems at the nexus of drones and privacy in recent months. To offer the most intriguing parallels, I tried to keep my questions to Calo as similar to the ones as I posed to Raptopoulos as possible. What rationale do companies like Amazon and Matternet give for creating drone-delivery networks? Some people are saying Mr. Bezos made this announcement with no intention to carry through. I disagree. I think companies like Amazon and Matternet like drone delivery for a few reasons. The trend is toward immediate consumer gratification. We are actually behind China, for instance, where I understand hundreds of delivery services translate into fast, low-cost delivery in urban environments. A second, underappreciated reason Amazon might incorporate drones into their business model is to attract talent and investment. There is no denying that innovation is a currency in the tech world today. Is there actually an efficiency bonus? (Or can one be imagined with some sort of system in the future?) Today, drone delivery would not be efficient. Even if operated by a human being, drones cannot travel far with a payload. Amazon and Matternet are banking on gains in performance and lower costs over time. Given your research, how close are we to this kind of future? How quickly could the Amazon Prime AIR future happen? I am a law professor, not an engineer. But I do talk to roboticists quite a bit. There is a range, but many believe we could see what Mr. Bezos described within four years. Note that the first DARPA Grand Challenge involving driverless cars was in 2004. No team completed the challenge that year. Fully autonomous cars came within a half-decade, and are now within a couple of years of being commercialized (if you believe the statements of multiple car-markers). What are the major challenges? I see three categories of challenges. The first category, as we've alluded to, is technical. For drone delivery to work, you would need better energy sources, better software, and likely improvements in physical design. But note that companies and universities are working on these problems, as are thousands of hobbyists (ask Chris Anderson of DIY Drones). The second category is regulatory. Mr. Bezos appears to have autonomous delivery in mind. The Federal Aviation Administration's roadmap to integrate commercial drones into domestic airspace specifically says (at page 33) that "Autonomous operations are not permitted" outside line of sight of the operator. Amazon and others would have to work with the FAA on this and other issues. There are related challenges around litigation including trespass, negligence, nuisance, and other potential lawsuits from angry citizens. Which brings me to a third category: social forces. Many people find drones unsettling. They understandably worry about being hurt or watched. How people come to see this technology will drive adoption and legal risk. I will say that Mr. Bezos probably did the image of drones a favor just by delinking the technology to a degree from targeted killing. What about range? Range is a big issue, both because of the energy source, and due to the complexity that attends navigating more, and more diverse terrain. The further you have to go, the more that could go wrong. How about reliability? I think this is a very real, but again, likely solvable issue. The FAA is about to select its testing sites for drone use. Hopefully these six sites will help drone manufactures and operators make considerable gains in reliability. Note that technology need not be perfect to see widespread adoption. Hundreds of people die every year from falling out of beds. How should we think about litigation around commercial drone flights? I believe there will be two waves of litigation attending commercial drones. The first will involve tort claims related to various commercial applications. People will say a drone user trespassed on their land, violated their privacy, created a nuisance, or even physically injured them. I think the common law, being versatile by design, is up to the task of addressing these claims. I described the second wave of litigation in my article Open Robotics: drones will one day function as the equivalent of flying smart phones. Consumers will buy a drone from one party and download an app from another. This will pose a significant challenge, I argue, for product liability law. Should certain reliability measures be required? Yes, and this could take several forms. The FAA itself could require a certain amount of testing before issuing a commercial license to use drones, the way the state of Nevada does with driverless cars. Or courts could look to industry standards in determining whether a given accident falls below the requisite standard of care. Won't people shoot them out of the sky? A few people in Colorado might. I don’t think the phenomenon will be widespread, any more than vandalizing a vending machine is. Shooting drones out of the sky, except in defense of a person or maybe property, is illegal. The shooter could face criminal charges or a lawsuit from, in Amazon’s case, a well-resourced company. That is a pretty good disincentive. The greater fear may well be hacking drones—this technology will have be secure enough that bored teenagers cannot go shop-downing. What does the US regulatory situation look like to you? The use of drones for a commercial purpose is not allowed today. But Congress has directed the FAA to fashion rules to integrate commercial drones by 2015. The FAA has yet to give details on how a company like Matternet would go about securing permission to operate drones for delivery or another purpose. They have given some hints, however, about what technical challenges would need to be address and what restrictions might be in place, including around civil liberties. What are the implications of this kind of drone network, if it scaled up? I think it is important to consider the bigger picture. Drones won’t just deliver goods to your door. They will be used to deliver goods over a long haul. Or between stores. Imagine if you’re shopping at Best Buy and you ask after an out-of-stock item. How great would it be if Best Buy could fly one over from the next nearest store while you wait. If this proves to be economical and a competitive advantage, then I think the marketplace will (try to) deliver it. You've specialized in privacy and drones. How do retail delivery networks figure into the overall privacy-drone nexus? There are problems, but maybe not unique ones. Drones greatly increase the capacity for surveillance, including by corporations. But delivery drones are not necessarily architected to observe. Still, you could imagine abuses. What if, for instance, law enforcement were to ask Amazon for all of the drone footage in a given area? Or even require Amazon to alert law enforcement if its drones saw something unlawful? My hope is that the FAA will follow the advice of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (where I’m on the advisory board) and require meaningful privacy safeguards before issuing certificates of authorization. And I’m encouraged that the recent FAA road map does repeatedly mention privacy, albeit without offering too many specifics | ||
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{CC}StealthBlue
United States41117 Posts
Google grows more and more like Amazon with each passing month, transforming itself into an honest-to-goodness online shopping company, and this evolution is increasingly overt. But things got really cool today with the news that the web giant is posed to challenge Amazon with an army of robots. In an excellent piece of reporting, The New York Times’ John Markoff reveals that, led by the former head of its Android mobile operating system, Google is quietly buying up robotics startups for a project that appears more than just experimental. “If Amazon can imagine delivering books by drones,” Markoff writes, “is it too much to think that Google might be planning to one day have one of the robots hop off an automated Google Car and race to your doorstep to deliver a package?” The difference between Amazon’s drone stunt and Google’s retail robot skunkworks, run by Andy Rubin, is that it seems far more serious. While Amazon released an unrealistic marketing video that had little to do with how its operations really work, Markoff’s sources say that Google is taking incremental steps to automate steps all along the consumer-product supply chain, from manufacturing to shipping. Delivery would seem to be the process where Google has made the strongest advances, though its self-driving cars predate Rubin’s project. Speculation that autonomous vehicles would someday power Google’s new same-day delivery online shopping service arose almost simultaneously with the announcement of the service itself. But delivery — the so-called “last mile” — is only one piece of the process that gets products from manufacturer to consumer. Source | ||
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hp.Shell
United States2527 Posts
On December 03 2013 11:50 Wombat_NI wrote: I don't really get the 'why' in its current form, but it's pretty cool tech. The whole point of this, from a long-term perspective, is to monopolize the shipping market. When you can order anything from Amazon and have it delivered by drone within one hour, give or take, there's a pretty small chance of you shopping somewhere else that takes 24 hours minimum to deliver. | ||
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TheRealArtemis
687 Posts
Great. Now all we need is a universal software AI system called Skynet and we are golden  | ||
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Roe
Canada6002 Posts
On December 02 2013 11:53 killa_robot wrote: All they need to do is make a law requiring the flight path of a drone to stay on a road. I doubt it'd be much louder than your average traffic. Then again think of how much the noise will increase by having flying machines AND cars going. And the skyline disappears even further. I suppose the problem of vandals could be solved by having cameras on them (only increasing the surveillance problem) which send back the feed to a database. | ||
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Djzapz
Canada10681 Posts
On December 06 2013 07:58 hp.Shell wrote: The whole point of this, from a long-term perspective, is to monopolize the shipping market. When you can order anything from Amazon and have it delivered by drone within one hour, give or take, there's a pretty small chance of you shopping somewhere else that takes 24 hours minimum to deliver. No, that's not the point. They have no intention of monopolizing the shipping market, not even in the long term because so far, even they know that there's no way going for that could be viable in the foreseeable future. It's just an extra service at bet. They know that without years of R&D and huge investments, this isn't going to be cheap and it won't be possible to expand it to the entire population. It has other limitations too, like weather, weight and sized of the package, etc. That said, it would be awesome if warehouses became fully automated. The automated forklift goes and picks up item off the shelf, puts it on a drone, which leaves, drops off package and comes back... I can picture warehouses with tens of drones flying in and out at any given moment. The only staff would be engineers dealing with the drones. Not going to happen but it would be cool. | ||
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sluggaslamoo
Australia4494 Posts
On December 02 2013 11:57 BigFan wrote: Interesting idea. Not sure how good the implementation will end up being though seeing as there are roadblocks to it like Sabu113 mentioned or how does a drone know that they should land on the front yard and not the back or roof? What about animals? What if your pet runs towards it, the blades could technically hurt the animal so does the drone have a sensor or can it detect body heat? etc... The cheapest way might be to have an iPhone app where you can specifically give it a gps location to drop it at. Even then the technology to see where to land is already available, if its altitude is higher than ground level when it lands its obviously a problem. A bunch of metrics shouldn't make it too difficult to know where to land. | ||
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sluggaslamoo
Australia4494 Posts
On December 06 2013 13:18 Djzapz wrote: No, that's not the point. They have no intention of monopolizing the shipping market, not even in the long term because so far, even they know that there's no way going for that could be viable in the foreseeable future. It's just an extra service at bet. They know that without years of R&D and huge investments, this isn't going to be cheap and it won't be possible to expand it to the entire population. It has other limitations too, like weather, weight and sized of the package, etc. That said, it would be awesome if warehouses became fully automated. The automated forklift goes and picks up item off the shelf, puts it on a drone, which leaves, drops off package and comes back... I can picture warehouses with tens of drones flying in and out at any given moment. The only staff would be engineers dealing with the drones. Not going to happen but it would be cool. "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." -- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943. http://www.rinkworks.com/said/predictions.shtml | ||
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Djzapz
Canada10681 Posts
We'll see. | ||
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emythrel
United Kingdom2599 Posts
On December 02 2013 11:09 AnachronisticAnarchy wrote: Innovation. I wonder if GPS tech is precise and detailed enough for this to be reliable, though. The commercial GPS used for tomtom etc, maybe. But the kind of gps they use in Commercial Jets? Yes. A passenger plane basically flies itself from take off to landing these days. High end GPS can pin point down to a few centimeters and you would only need accuracy of a few meters to land in the correct garden or outside the correct front door. | ||
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hp.Shell
United States2527 Posts
On December 06 2013 13:18 Djzapz wrote: No, that's not the point. They have no intention of monopolizing the shipping market, not even in the long term because so far, even they know that there's no way going for that could be viable in the foreseeable future. It's just an extra service at bet. They know that without years of R&D and huge investments, this isn't going to be cheap and it won't be possible to expand it to the entire population. It has other limitations too, like weather, weight and sized of the package, etc. That said, it would be awesome if warehouses became fully automated. The automated forklift goes and picks up item off the shelf, puts it on a drone, which leaves, drops off package and comes back... I can picture warehouses with tens of drones flying in and out at any given moment. The only staff would be engineers dealing with the drones. Not going to happen but it would be cool. I read a magazine article detailing Bezos' plans for Amazon's future and one of the biggest points he made was minimizing shipping times. He already has a cash cow with Prime's free 2-day shipping, and he's expanding the number of warehouses to increase efficiency. I understand it's an expensive service, and you're right about the weight limitations. But customers who are willing to pay for the lost time will be monopolized on small packages. Of course the shipping price will be premium, but when you get your premium item in an hour that you would otherwise have to drive to the next town over, or wait a day to get, you can see the advantages of the drone system. In your automated warehouse scenario, where does the drone drop off the package? The truck? I mean I guess that's a good way to fire all of your warehouse employees. Maybe that's the solution to his "too costly to make more warehouses in smaller areas" problem. Edit: Of course this low ship time will only apply to people living in urban areas in the beginning, but as more warehouses are made in the areas in between, others may benefit from the lower time, even if it is only 10 hours. Then it would be a question of how long Amazon is willing to allow a drone to be on a single ship. Amazon Prime Air - Youtube wrote: The goal of this new delivery system is to get packages into customers' hands in 30 minutes or less using unmanned aerial vehicles. Putting Prime Air into commercial use will take some number of years as we advance technology and wait for the necessary FAA rules and regulations. | ||
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Djzapz
Canada10681 Posts
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LaNague
Germany9118 Posts
The drone will then land ontop of the signal. | ||
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furymonkey
New Zealand1587 Posts
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Rowa
Belgium962 Posts
some of them maybe play StarCraft... | ||
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Foblos
United States426 Posts
It'll never work. You're going to need a google+ account to enjoy robots. It works with youtube because there isn't an alternative, but Amazon's +less drones will make their ability to shoehorn google+ even more less feasible. | ||
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Noocta
France12578 Posts
On December 02 2013 13:28 ElMeanYo wrote: Drones are the future for a lot of things. Get used to seeing them all over the place in 5-10 years. Here's a fun one if you want to see what drones are capable of: Thanks for linking that. I am fascinated and really scared at the same time about this. | ||
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