1. Safety: drones - multirotors, specifically - are very safe devices, inherently. They are incredibly simple (4-8 motors and no other moving parts). If they are dangerous, it's only because of lack of investment by the manufacturers to make mission critical hardware/software.
That's the next step in the drone ecosystem though, as commercial use is gaining traction (multirotors are barely 6 years old now, IIRC. Mission critical flight systems haven't had time to develop).
Furthermore, octocopters (8 motors, and there are variants with more) have built in redundancy (assuming a reasonably intelligent flight controller) against the loss of each motor.
2. Cost: An Amazon drone could be manufactured for few thousand dollars - $3k is the RETAIL COST of a DJI drone that can fly 10kg overall weight (drone, payload, batteries). That means at scale, and without retail margins, Amazon could make them for less than $10k, even if they are much larger and more sophisticated.
The only wearable is the battery, and these can do many cycles (500+) before needing replacement, when properly managed. Other than that, the cost of maintenance are simply nonexistent.
3. Flight time: Simply irrelevant on an urban delivery service. An off the shelf commercial drone today can fly 10kg AUW for 20 minutes easily, lets say 12 minutes if flying at 40km/h - that means it has a range of 8km (and that's basing on simple off the shelf stuff, not purpose built and optimized systems). Manhattan is 3.7km wide and 21km long, meaning that with a handful of automated battery replacement hubs you can cover the its entire span.
4. Fleets and carrying weight: These drones will fly non stop, carrying up to 10kg at each payload. That covers 95% of the typical Amazon order and probably 99.5% of the things that you need just this second. The drones will fly non stop - I can't imagine needing more than a few dozens to cover a large city.
Bottom line: the technology is definitely within reach; I'd argue it's there, just needing some rich commercial entity to tie all parts together, test and certify.
Nothing here awaits a scientific breakthrough to be made possible, and I'd say that technologically, it's easier (and probably safer) than self driving cars (which no one doubts).
I'm very doubtful of drone delivery until battery tech advances at least 10x.
In dense, built-up areas there is no space to land. You can't fly between buildings and land on a sidewalk in Manhattan, and where would you leave the package there?
In rural and suburban areas, where houses have backyards, the flight range starts to be a problem. Amazon isn't going to build a full warehouse every 5-10km, even "drone depots" seem doubtful with that density. With "drone depots" instead of proper warehouses, the packages would still have to be trucked in, so 1-2 day delivery instead of 1-2 hour delivery, and the only motivation would be cost saving over traditional mail carriers.
Perhaps if batteries become a lot more capable, then having drone depots every 20-50km in suburbia might end up profitable over paying for mail.
While I agree with you that space to land is an issue, in terms of trucking in packages to smaller depots, Amazon already does this in some markets like the UK, where it is investing heavily in regional depots and doing "first level" delivery from their large warehouses to the smaller depots themselves.
Here it depends on quite high population density in the regions they are putting depots, which still has the landing space issue, but e.g. their two London depots puts them within possible delivery distance of several million people with front or back gardens. A large proportion of the ones who don't have private gardens have communal spaces.
The bigger problem than where to land for me would be how to handle "handover" to their customer without ending up leaving packages in plain sight in areas where it's easy for someone to snatch it.
And what about signal jamming or drones being shot down? Not only for package theft, also to strip or steal the drones themselves? I'm really curious how robust this delivery method is against external manipulation and general human misbehavior.
Or say there's a defect - some structural damage - and a drone crashes or loses its 10 kg package into a front screen of a car driving on the interstate.
Honestly, I don't see a way this could work. Not because delivery by drone in densely populated areas is economically and technically unsound. Because of... other stuff.
The problem with drones is that they're insecure. People will shoot them down for fun, and even if they don't, whenever they land they'll have to leave their packages in places that are either insecure or exposed to the elements. If it really takes off, you will need ways to manage "drone traffic" and insurance will be extremely expensive.
To top it off, they will simply not work on most days in Northern Europe, where rain and strong winds are common. I think the evolution of airplanes (which "we" believed would soon replace cars, back in the '20s) showed the problems we will always have with flying: it's a messy affair at the best of times.
I applaud Amazon for its faith in robotics, but I'd argue that we're more likely to get self-driving vans (which will either carry a very relaxed delivery guy, or will let people like supers open van doors with a code), or other incremental disruptions, before we see a wide deployment of delivery drones.
I hear this a lot, along with comments about self-driving cars being unusable because 'people will run in front of them to make them stop', and I just don't get it. In what country would it be deemed legal and normal for people to shoot down drones? Do people take pot-shots at light aircraft? Why would people suddenly want to shhot at drones? The same with self-driving cars - people don't run into traffic to make human drivers stop, although they would certainly try their best not to run you over, so why would they start doing it with self-driving cars. I've also heard the argument that people will vandalise the cars, destroy the LIDAR sensors and so on, but yet we don't have spates of people throwinf paint over the windscreen of normal cars. I think it says more about the mentality of the commentors that about the peeibilities for automated vehicles, flying or driving.
I'm not sure it is really that big of a fear, but shooting at people is totally psychopathic. Random property damage happens WAY more often than random murder.
Shooting down a drone is like throwing a rock in a window or graffiti. In a lot of areas, those crimes are a huge problem.
> In what country would it be deemed legal and normal for people to shoot down drones? Do people take pot-shots at light aircraft? Why would people suddenly want to shhot at drones?
I don't think it would be at all routine. But I can imagine trouble-making adolescents doing that (here in the US). Probably wouldn't be make-or-break for drones. But it would be an interesting challenge for Amazon -- how can we retrieve this equipment and how can we investigate its attack/distinguish from part failures?
The security concern (for the drone and the contents) is a bit overblown to me. What about all those ATM bank machines in all sorts of "insecure" places? We've somehow figured out how to keep money inside a machine that is unattended. The amount of theft that occurs on those things is minuscule and banks put the cost of such theft into their profit calculations.
The Amazon drone won't take off unless you confirm in advance (using the app) being able to accept the package, and you need to enter a code at arrival for it to release it to you. I am sure the drone can call for help, and keep lots of video and other evidence of what happened to it.
Ultimately, Amazon just calculates the loss of 1/10000 drone packages into their profit calculations.
Yeah maybe it's not the same solution. But it's a solvable problem, I believe. I trust that the Amazon team had this conversation 2 years ago, and came to some conclusion that the risk was manageable. Would they send their lawyer to congress fighting FAA regulations if an 8-year-old kid with a pellet gun could knock one out of the sky?
> 1. Safety: drones - multirotors, specifically - are very safe devices, inherently.
Aside from that whole thing where they have a dozen or so whirling knife blades that could take off a body appendage, or the fact that one small power failure or an inflight impact with a bird or a wire turns them into 30 pound falling lethal skull crushing objects.
Yeah I heard that some kid once got hit by a bicycle, that's why those have been banned for years.
Oh, and right, I once bumped into someone in the street, I guess that's why they closed down the streets.
But yeah, things might possibly go wrong from time to time so best not to try. Giving up is always they best thing.
I'm pretty sure we have a century of training people/kids to stay off the roads because roads are dangerous. Flying drones /everywhere/, including your fenced in yard, makes /everywhere/ dangerous.
Yeah, my comment wasn't bashing drones. I think drones are great (outside government use) .... I just know Amazon well enough, and amazons business well enough to know this is a joke.
When I say it's a joke I'm not being pejorative.
Amazon regularly releases press releases and propaganda designed to make the company look good but that have nothing to do with its products or that aren't real initiatives. This is one of them. IT's purely propaganda.
you're making a lot of assumptions about the economics and quality advancements of control software in your response-- - you're assuming pie in the sky comes true.
1. Safety: drones - multirotors, specifically - are very safe devices, inherently. They are incredibly simple (4-8 motors and no other moving parts). If they are dangerous, it's only because of lack of investment by the manufacturers to make mission critical hardware/software. That's the next step in the drone ecosystem though, as commercial use is gaining traction (multirotors are barely 6 years old now, IIRC. Mission critical flight systems haven't had time to develop). Furthermore, octocopters (8 motors, and there are variants with more) have built in redundancy (assuming a reasonably intelligent flight controller) against the loss of each motor.
2. Cost: An Amazon drone could be manufactured for few thousand dollars - $3k is the RETAIL COST of a DJI drone that can fly 10kg overall weight (drone, payload, batteries). That means at scale, and without retail margins, Amazon could make them for less than $10k, even if they are much larger and more sophisticated. The only wearable is the battery, and these can do many cycles (500+) before needing replacement, when properly managed. Other than that, the cost of maintenance are simply nonexistent.
3. Flight time: Simply irrelevant on an urban delivery service. An off the shelf commercial drone today can fly 10kg AUW for 20 minutes easily, lets say 12 minutes if flying at 40km/h - that means it has a range of 8km (and that's basing on simple off the shelf stuff, not purpose built and optimized systems). Manhattan is 3.7km wide and 21km long, meaning that with a handful of automated battery replacement hubs you can cover the its entire span.
4. Fleets and carrying weight: These drones will fly non stop, carrying up to 10kg at each payload. That covers 95% of the typical Amazon order and probably 99.5% of the things that you need just this second. The drones will fly non stop - I can't imagine needing more than a few dozens to cover a large city.
Bottom line: the technology is definitely within reach; I'd argue it's there, just needing some rich commercial entity to tie all parts together, test and certify. Nothing here awaits a scientific breakthrough to be made possible, and I'd say that technologically, it's easier (and probably safer) than self driving cars (which no one doubts).