[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What ever happened to the "coming wave" of d...
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Ask HN: What ever happened to the "coming wave" of delivery drones?
I feel like a few years ago all the rage was that Amazon and other
retailers were going to deliver things via drones, straight to your
doorstep Food delivery companies as well seemed to be testing out
robots that would bring your food to you albeit in a more sidewalk
bound way Its been a few years and I have yet to have a single
thing drone delivered to my house What happened to that alternate
future? Are companies still working on it? Or did we move on from
that idea for some reasons we discovered?
Author : cgb223
Score : 14 points
Date : 2023-07-17 22:17 UTC (44 minutes ago)
| nonameiguess wrote:
| There are still pretty serious technical and engineering hurdles
| to overcome to make this kind of idea feasible. It was always
| hype without substance. But even assuming these challenges were
| overcome, which is inevitable eventually even if it's a century
| from now, I get the feeling this would largely end up getting
| banned in many places. I think regular people hanging out in
| their backyards and going for walks in the neighborhood would
| feel a vague persistent menace if there were constantly drones
| zipping around overhead. Think about the fact that you can load
| up a delivery truck with hundreds of packages at a time. Drones
| don't have that kind of cargo capacity. The fleet would need to
| be massive to replace truck deliveries. The sky would be full of
| them.
| kylixz wrote:
| There are some companies/efforts in the space:
|
| https://www.manna.aero/ https://www.flyzipline.com/
| https://wing.com/
| https://corporate.walmart.com/newsroom/2022/05/24/were-bring...
|
| Several more out there still from the initial bust.
|
| Regulations make it challenging for beyond visual line of sight
| (BVLOS) autonomous delivery, particularly in the US with the FAA.
| Also, it's a hard problem in autonomy to nail it every time
| despite advancements. Less than 1% failure is still potentially
| catastrophic when you're carrying a few pounds of lithium
| batteries above people's backyards.
| Thoeu388 wrote:
| I seen some drones in Africa delivering small packages into
| remote villages, mostly medication. It is small RC airplane (not
| quad copter), dropping parashutes on an airfield. It replaced
| much bigger Cesnas.
|
| And drone delivery is quite successful at Ukraine...
| randomluck040 wrote:
| I was working with drones for a while and one issue with carrying
| weight was distance. If you want a drone capable of carrying
| weight it has to have a specific size to accommodate the heavy
| object as well as batteries that get heavier the longer you want
| to fly and the more power you need to transport said object.
| Outside of that rules about line of sight were a thing, so you
| couldn't just let the drone fly a pre-programmed path but you
| also needed to see it. There is also a risk of being shot down. I
| think at the end of the day search and rescue or coast guards
| might use drones to deliver something very quickly if there is no
| other way but outside of that I see challenges that are rather
| hard to overcome.
| jurassicfoxy wrote:
| My friend had coffee delivered via drone (Canberra, Australia)
| and it was pretty fun. Certainly feels less wasteful
| (energetically) than a car & driver. The massive drone was pretty
| cool, too. That being said, Canberra is probably the perfect city
| for a drone delivery service, with so much open space.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| 75% of blood deliveries in Rwanda outside Kigali are done via
| drone (flyzipline.com)
| Jasper_ wrote:
| Are you kidding me? It was all basically vaporware that
| disappeared when the free money ended. The Kiwi food delivery
| robots were basically fake -- they only went about 1/8 of a mile
| automatically. So they'd drive a car to the end of a street with
| your food and a robot, and then get the robot out of the car, put
| the food inside, and then the robot would hobble over a couple
| hundred feet to your door. Absolutely useless.
|
| From https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Kiwibots-win-
| fa...
|
| > The Kiwibots do not figure out their own routes. Instead,
| people in Colombia, the home country of Chavez and his two co-
| founders, plot "waypoints" for the bots to follow, sending them
| instructions every five to 10 seconds on where to go
|
| > On the ground in Berkeley, people also do a lot of robot
| support. Traveling at 1 to 11/2 mph, the bots would take too long
| to chug to local restaurants, so Kiwi workers pick up the food at
| restaurants and take it via bikes or scooters to meeting spots
| around campus to insert into an insulated bag in the bots'
| storage compartment.
|
| > The average distance a robot covers for a delivery is about 200
| meters (656 feet, or one-eighth of a mile) which makes them fall
| short of a "last-mile" solution.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| I don't remember where, but I read a lengthy comment from someone
| in the industry which said there were two main things preventing
| delivery drones from being a viable market:
|
| 1. FAA regulations - delivery drones can't operate within X miles
| of an airport (technically they can, but it requires a much
| stricter degree of certification and compliance nobody wants to
| bother with)
|
| 2. Drones need a landing space, so people without yards (like
| apartment and townhouse dwellers, who make up a lot of the
| population in exactly the densely populated areas where you'd
| want to use drones to begin with) can't be served
|
| And it turns out that once you exclude "houses within X miles of
| an airport" and "houses without an LZ", there aren't enough
| customers left to make delivery drones worth it.
| djohnston wrote:
| 2 is surprising as that's the opposite of where I'd expect
| delivery drones to be useful. You don't need them in dense
| urban environments where a stocked truck offloads inventory
| with low mileage. You want them in rural areas where as the
| crow flies makes a difference and it's expensive to have a
| truck driving about sparsely populated areas.
| ajhurliman wrote:
| I saw a demo recently where they had a drone flying high and
| it zip-lined a package down to the destination directly below
| it, so the drone never had to get close to the ground. I'm
| not sure if that's current strategy but it seems like a cool
| idea to cut down on noise and proximity issues.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| The issue there is that the battery tech to support long
| distance delivery drones does not exist yet.
| avar wrote:
| The flurry of excitement was before the FAA started actively
| regulating it.
|
| Since then e.g. Amazon is still nominally pursuing it, but here's
| a recent article about how that's going:
| https://www.businessinsider.com/faa-restrictions-are-curtail...
| Greenpants wrote:
| There's a lot of research done with drones but the world isn't
| quite ready yet. Realistically, drones delivering packages will
| get shot down in the US, simply for being unmanned and flying
| over people's neighbourhoods. People easily feel threatened.
|
| Perhaps more importantly, there's too much that could go wrong.
| What about legislation where they may fly and how high? What if a
| drone crashes into someone or something? What if someone's
| package gets stolen?
|
| As much as the technology enthusiasts in us enjoy the concept of
| delivery drones, most of us humans still prefer a fellow human in
| the process of delivering packages to handle edge cases where
| things might go wrong.
| nmstoker wrote:
| Great question. I'm not aware of any concrete reasons, but I
| suppose issues relating to these sorts of points:
|
| - despite the sky being generally less constrained than ground
| delivery there are challenging obstructions, which are
| potentially far more risky than for ground travel: nudge past
| many ground obstructions you'd be okay, do the same in the sky,
| your drone is toast
|
| - liability is far greater in the sky if your drone carrying
| something comes down in an uncontrolled manner (on someone or
| something)
|
| - obstructions are likely to be high at the very points people
| are willing to come meet the drone (antennas, overhead power
| lines, washing lines, nets, etc) and they're often hard to spot
|
| - unattended drop off is harder for drones in the places where
| customers are most dense (ie cities) upping the complexity
| further
|
| - potential regulatory issues (but I understand below certain
| heights it's generally not regulated in many countries)
|
| - bad PR from noisy drones!
|
| - risks from non customers interfering
|
| - challenges with carrying what you're dropping off: if it's
| heavy you need bigger drones; if it's light you'd be tying up a
| drone with something small, unless you can figure how to drop off
| multiple items, or you have a mixture of drone sizes
|
| They all seem like they could plausibly be solved but I'm no
| drone engineer!
|
| Maybe it could get going with targeting particular items that are
| strongly appealing to customers and might narrow the complexities
| due to being more uniform than a random Amazon basket. I believe
| an early use in Bhutan was for medical deliveries. Maybe
| something premium like ice-cream or cocktails might appeal with
| the right marketing?!
| ilamont wrote:
| Jeff Bezos, 2013: "There's no reason they can't be effectively
| used as delivery vehicles"
|
| "It can't be before 2015, because that's the earliest that we can
| get the rules from the FAA. But it could be 4 or 5 years."
|
| - 10 mile radius from Amazon FC
|
| - half hour delivery
|
| - Objects up to 5 lbs, which is 86% of items Amazon delivered at
| that time
|
| Said the biggest problems were redundancy, reliability, and
| safety
|
| https://www.cbsnews.com/video/amazon-ceo-unveils-drone-deliv...
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(page generated 2023-07-17 23:01 UTC)