
Swiss Post Suspends Drone Delivery Service After Second Crash - sytelus
https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/drones/swiss-post-suspends-drone-delivery-service-after-second-crash
======
sytelus
This could have been very ugly:

 _the 10-kg drone suffered an uncontrolled crash “in a wooded area of Zurich’s
university quarter only 50 yards away from a group of playing kindergarten
children.”_

One of the things that few people are aware about is quadrotor MTBF is very
low relative to other common vehicles. For many drones, the expectation for
failure dramatically increases just after 100-200 hours of operation[1].
Figuring out points of failures, building systematic fault trees and
increasing MTBF by order of magnitude or two would be big part of the drone
delivery projects.

[1] [https://catsr.vse.gmu.edu/SYST490/490_2014_SPDAV/DST-
NSPDAV_...](https://catsr.vse.gmu.edu/SYST490/490_2014_SPDAV/DST-
NSPDAV_USMA.pdf)

~~~
crazygringo
Wow, that's shockingly low. The paper doesn't describe why -- do you have any
idea what part(s) are failing so quickly? The rotors, the motors, the battery?

For commercial delivery service, it seems quite clear that we'll need either

1) "enterprise-grade" drones (like difference between consumer and enterprise
SSD's),

2) reliable sensors to detect imminent failure before a flight,

and/or 3) easy replacement of failing parts.

I mean, for many hobbyists 100-200 hrs seems like a reasonable cost/benefit
tradeoff... but not even _close_ for commercial delivery services.

~~~
jacquesm
> do you have any idea what part(s) are failing so quickly? The rotors, the
> motors, the battery?

It doesn't really matter what fails, what matters is that there is no way to
do a controlled descent once anything goes wrong on a loaded drone because
there is no margin for error. A drone this heavy relies on the whole chain of
components functioning perfectly.

I'm surprised it is as good as it is given the number of parts. If it were a
winged drone you'd at least have a chance to glide it to a safe spot, but a
drone that is kept up by spinning props can only crash uncontrolled. There was
a video of downing one in a more controlled way but the only fault it could
cover was single rotor failure and even then the amount of control was very
limited.

These things have absolutely no business over areas occupied by people.

~~~
michaelt

      If it were a winged drone you'd at
      least have a chance to glide it to
      a safe spot, but a drone
    

The last time I looked at the retail quadcopter/RC plane market, when faced
with a communications failure most of the quadcopters would return to the
launch point and safely land. None of the RC planes had such a function - most
seemed to just turn off the propeller and glide in whatever direction they
were facing at the time.

Seemed to me the quadcopter response to communication failures was a much
safer one. Is this still the case? It was quite some time ago.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
>The last time I looked at the retail quadcopter/RC plane market, when faced
with a communications failure most of the quadcopters would return to the
launch point and safely land. None of the RC planes had such a function - most
seemed to just turn off the propeller and glide in whatever direction they
were facing at the time.

Once you have a quadcopter you've got enough digital hardware and software
that adding "return to base" is basically free since it's just an additional
software routeine.

RC planes don't already have the required hardware/software to implement a
return to base feature because they don't need it and of course nobody is
going to greatly increase the cost and complexity of the product just to add
that one feature.

~~~
83
A handful of the quad controllers also support planes. I have multiple RC
planes with that functionality - it adds a little complexity but not a ton.

------
raynr
As an additional potential recovery mode: ETH Zurich's Institute for Dynamic
Systems and Control [0] has done amazing work on quadcopter recovery after
rotor control loss [1] (I believe they are down to controlled flight with only
one or two rotors left, but I cannot find the link right now). I've been
waiting for this to filter into the real world but have yet to see it.

[0] [https://idsc.ethz.ch/](https://idsc.ethz.ch/) [1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek0FrCaogcs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek0FrCaogcs)

~~~
rkagerer
This is really impressive. Are the algos published / open sourced /
licensable?

~~~
nairboon
Here you go: [https://www.flyingmachinearena.ethz.ch/wp-
content/publicatio...](https://www.flyingmachinearena.ethz.ch/wp-
content/publications/2014/mueIEEE14.pdf)

------
alex_young
Amazing. I can see my flat in that photo :)

Anyway, I think there are a few things to point out here:

This program was in place to test the efficiency of sending biological samples
between hospitals quickly.

I'm not entirely sure why this is a problem we need to solve. Is it really
better to use drone delivery of blood samples to central hospitals than to add
another testing machine at the remote location? Seems like the answer could be
no.

It's really weird to get a letter in the mail telling you that a blood
delivery drone crashed in a lake nearby.

This program seems like it's an answer in search of a problem.

~~~
anonoholic
A lab is not just "a testing machine". Depending on the analysis being
performed, you need an array specialist equipment. Then the lab has to be
staffed.

I imagine shipping samples to a shared facility is significantly more cost
effective, otherwise it wouldn't be being trialled.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_laboratory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_laboratory)

------
shpx
> According to the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the 10-kg
> drone suffered an uncontrolled crash “in a wooded area of Zurich’s
> university quarter only _50 yards_ away from a group of playing kindergarten
> children.”

Something tells me that a German newspaper wouldn't be using yards. Sure
enough, looking at the source, it's a mistake in Google's translation model

> Dass die mehr als 10 Kilogramm schwere Drohne vom Typ Matternet M2V9 in
> einem Waldstück des Zürcher Universitätsviertels nur rund _50 Meter_
> entfernt von einer Gruppe spielender Kindergartenkinder zu Boden krachte,
> erwähnte der staatliche Logistikkonzern indes nicht.

Bing translate gets it right though.

~~~
kgwgk
That’s a fine translation, better than “only 54.68 yards away from a group of
playing kindergarten children.”

~~~
jaclaz
Well, to be fair the original German has "rund" in it that was lost in
translation, so that would be "only approximately 50 meters", which would make
the 50 yards acceptable.

Probably I would have translated it as "less than 60 yards" ;-).

~~~
jarvic
Interestingly, if you remove "rund" it changes from "only 50 yards" to "just
50 meters".

------
1023bytes
Delivery drones are definitely unnecessary in densely populated areas. It's
cool and futuristic, but it's not economical at all, it's very unsafe and also
loud. However it's a wonderful thing for rural places with poor
infrastructure. For example Zipline in Rwanda, one of the most interesting
solutions an engineering perspective too:
[https://youtube.com/watch?v=jEbRVNxL44c](https://youtube.com/watch?v=jEbRVNxL44c)

------
PhilWright
Having large numbers of drones in the sky, where any failure has the potential
to drop a large weight on a person seems like a show stopper. Or just crashing
onto a house or car and causing damage is going to get annoying for the
community real fast. I doubt drones can be made as reliable as aeroplanes at
anything like a realistic price.

~~~
weddpros
This is an emotional answer: "any failure...potential... large weight...
person... show stopper". That's emotions speaking, we need probabilities and
reason instead (because a delivery truck should trigger the same fear with you
but it doesn't).

Planes ARE the safest way to travel: maybe drones are the safest in certain
conditions, like for these urgent hospital deliveries in Switzerland, or in
dangerous/isolated settings. And maybe drones will become safer and safer,
like with parachutes in the article.

Okay the parachutes will need Dyneema strings instead of simple ones, just
like parachutes were used before Dyneema was invented. Oh wait, someone's
working on Dyneema parachutes for drones:
[https://www.textilemedia.com/latest-news/mobiletex/drone-
par...](https://www.textilemedia.com/latest-news/mobiletex/drone-parachute-
manufactured-from-dyneema/)

As you can see, there's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Find how you can save lives and make the world better, not how to use emotions
to exert power and kill Freedom. The world needs innovation more than ever, be
it electronic cigarettes or self driving cars or drones.

~~~
redis_mlc
This is a fanboy answer: "Planes ARE the safest way to travel: maybe drones
are the safest in certain conditions"

Western airliners are very safe, but the USA averages one GA accident per day:

[https://www.faa.gov/news/fact_sheets/news_story.cfm?newsId=2...](https://www.faa.gov/news/fact_sheets/news_story.cfm?newsId=21274)

Helicopters have much worse failure modes, even in multi-million dollar
aircraft. Small drones are the worst of all, and should not be flown over
populated areas.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_nut](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_nut)

The FAA historically has regulated that aircraft fly 500' and above over non
sparsely-populated areas for a reason. Or you lose your license.

Drone deliveries fundamentally violate that, as regardless of where your
warehouse is located, you're deliberately flying towards a populated area (ie.
customers.)

The above is why the FAA has justly been slow on allowing drones into the
airspace, and why you have to register them.

A constructive comment I can add is that I can only see delivery drones being
safe with a built-in fixed wing that allows it to glide to the ground power-
off below 10 mph.

Source: commercially-rated airplane pilot.

~~~
weddpros
347 lives lost per year, or one per million people. Similar to Prion disease
fatalities. Sure, that's 3 times more than lightening strikes... but that's
still extremely low AND safer than whatever.

As for the risk of a plane over a populated area, I think it's safe to say
that a 4kg drone is a much lesser threat than a Cessna weighing 200 times
more, and that's a very small plane. So it's really not fair to compare a
drone crash and a plane crash (we're not talking military drones here, I hope
you've read the article).

"...I can only see delivery drones being safe with a built-in fixed wing that
allows it to glide to the ground power-off below 10 mph": and it seems many
people disagree but feel free to prove them wrong and show the world how you
can glide a drone to the ground in a dense city to deliver blood at a
hospital.

------
Down_n_Out
I really don't get the hacker news algorithms on these posts, I've submitted
this interesting article 7 days ago [0] and there was no interest (which is
fine, that's not the issue). I guess 7 days is the cut-off then?

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20563123](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20563123)

------
nairboon
> This is the first time we had a failure on the vehicle’s parachute system.

Doesn't this mean that neither Matternet nor the Swiss Post tested the failure
modes of this drone enough? If it never happened before, they didn't test it
enough to get any estimate for a MTBF for this particular part.

But this is to be expected from the Swiss Post, they do sloppy work and blame
others, just read their dementi:

>As such, we have asked Matternet to implement various urgent measures:

>[...]The shrill whistle, which alerts people near the drone when it is making
an emergency landing, will be made louder.

The whistle couldn't be heard in that accident... Sound like somebody didn't
test a single emergency landing in that forest and asked the numerous
strollers whether they have heard anything

------
rkachowski
This says ~3000 successful flights with 2 crashes - how many road incidents
per journey does a standard mail truck encouter?

Is 1500 trips a low / mid / high figure with regards to collisions?

~~~
saalweachter
The USPS has ~30,000 motor vehicle accidents per year.

The entire USPS fleet travels ~1.28B miles / year, with the LLVs traveling
764M miles.

The LLVs travel about 18 miles per day, 300 days per year, which gives you an
estimated 43 million LLV trips per year.

Assuming all 30,000 motor vehicle accidents are LLVs, that amounts to 1
accident every 1433 LLV _trips_.

Of course, on each LLV "trip", it delivers letters and parcels to hundreds of
addresses; each drone delivery is presumably one.

(The USPS also averages 1 accident every ~43,000 miles; this is significantly
above the US average of 1 accident per 165,000 miles driven. I would assume
the increased rate is (1) USPS vehicles drive slow and stop frequently along
their routes; I would guess many accidents are other vehicles driving too fast
and trying to pass in unsafe areas (2) distracted driving; drivers are
performing other tasks eg retrieving the next addresses mail while driving and
(3) every USPS accident is likely reported; drivers are responsible for the
condition of their vehicle and small fender-benders that we might not report
are likely included in USPS statistics.)

~~~
petra
// 1 accident every 1433 LLV trips.

So an accident once per 1443 llv trips * ~400(average packages per llv trip)
-> an accident per ~600k packages -> will need an accident per 600k drone
trips * ~ 10mile/trip -> an accident per 6M drone miles.

------
lazyjones
This was posted a few days ago when it was "news":

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20590407](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20590407)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20563123](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20563123)

It's really odd sometimes how duplicate, late posts get more comments and
upvotes than the original. Perhaps the time of posting is too important.

------
zwkrt
I agree that this is bad, 2 crashes at relatively low volume is not great.
However, I do wonder if reason will prevail in the long run with regards to
overall safety and environmental impact. I recall early laws being very unfair
to vehicular traffic, such as the apocryphal law that if a car startled a
horse the owner should dismantle the car until the horse is no longer
perturbed.

------
jamisteven
Zipline seems to be the more like successor in this field.
[https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/drones/zipline-...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/drones/zipline-
emphasizes-safety-with-its-delivery-drones-in-preparation-for-us-operations)

------
ekianjo
One thing I don't understand is, why are they doing live testing above
inhabited areas? Until the tech is proven, the only right thing to do is to
implement drones routes that avoid populated areas as much as possible, or at
least go thru very sparsely populated areas by default, until all failure
modes are well understood.

~~~
Leherenn
They didn't, it happened over a forest. Many people seem to think it happened
near a kindergarten, but that's not the case, it just happened that
kindergarten-aged kids were playing in the area.

You can find everything in the report (in German)
[https://www.sust.admin.ch/inhalte/AV-
berichte/ZB_SUI-9903.pd...](https://www.sust.admin.ch/inhalte/AV-
berichte/ZB_SUI-9903.pdf) Just enter the coordinates of the crash in Google
map, you can see there's no school around.

~~~
ekianjo
Thanks, then the article was confusing on that particular point.

------
JetSpiegel
Why has IEEE Spectrum turned their nice HTML blog into a site that requires JS
to read?

------
benkarst
2 crashes. I didn't see the article mention how many successful deliveries
there have been.

------
4ntonius8lock
Sadly, as pointed out by Neil deGrasse Tyson, we respond to spectacle over
data.

How many deaths per 1,000,000,000 package delivery happen with trucks? Truck
deliver is not a zero death thing. I'd even want to see truck air pollution
factored in somehow.

If drones have a lower %, we should view falling death boxes as acceptable.
Even though it does have a strangely dystonia aspect to it.

~~~
PhilWright
I think the difference from a psychological point of view is that getting a
drone drop randomly on your head feels, well random. Therefore it does not
feel like you can do much of anything to avoid it, unlikely though it would be
in practice. Getting killed by a terrorist or mass killer feels equally bad
because it is random.

But something like sky divers getting killed does not bother me because I can
avoid it, by not sky diving. Just like I can choose not to drive and so avoid
almost any chance of being killed by another driver. It is the randomness and
the fact you cannot avoid it that, I think, makes to less acceptable.

~~~
weddpros
I personally know someone who was killed by a UPS truck on his parking lot.
Don't think randomness only happens to others.

~~~
reaperducer
But the example you use is exactly that: something happening to another
person.

------
jimmaswell
It seems so cowardly halting progress so fast just because of two harmless
crashes. There's never going to be zero risk to anything. Still much safer
than cars so far.

~~~
specialp
Progress is not necessarily halted by not having something in production.
Perhaps it needs more work in testing. The article says 3000 successes/2
failures. That is too high when you have 10kg things falling out of the sky.

~~~
rtpg
2 packages falling from the sky over 3000.... sounds like a higher failure
rate than the current vehicle delivery mechanisms.

I wonder what the score is for postal vehicles (similarly for crashes with
other vehicles and the like)

------
bayesian_horse
Who could have guessed that falling out of the sky would be the main issue
with things carrying things through the sky?

------
Invictus0
Seems strange that Swiss Post would be the first to test out these drones,
given the extremely high standard of quality that the Swiss demand. The
reality is that any new technology, especially hardware, will need time to
mature and work out the bugs. One crash out of 3000 isn't that bad: reality
has a lot of edge cases to test for.

~~~
sytelus
> One crash out of 3000 isn't that bad

It is actually _very bad_. Amazon ships ~2M packages per day by one estimates.
Assume only 10% of these gets drone delivered. This would translate to 66
crashes _each day_. If only 10% of these crashes happen on people, it would be
6 people randomly getting killed each day.

~~~
kenneth
If you look at the surface area of the world, a tiny percentage of it is taken
up by people's heads. Like, probably <.01%. Unless you'r eat a large gathering
(where right now it's illegal to fly drones.)

~~~
Retra
It's not just people's heads that need protection. Roads, traffic lights,
cars, power lines, windows... people can die in lots of ways other than having
a drone fall directly on their head.

