
Even if the Feds Let Them Fly, Amazon's Delivery Drones Are Still Nonsense - georgecmu
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/12/amazon-drone/
======
RandallBrown
Whenever I see one of these articles, I can't believe how narrow the author's
view of the world is that they can't imagine these drones actually working.

Imagine if they put a small warehouse in a big city, filled with their most
commonly sold items in that city. (For now we'll pretend the
warehouse/dronepad is on the roof of their Seattle headquarters, right in the
center of Seattle)

I can SEE Amazon's buildings from my apartment right now. It's probably a mile
or two as the crow (or drone) flies. That seems well within the range of what
Bezos talked about for Prime Air. I also have a rooftop deck on my building
that only residents can access. It's pretty big and would be a perfect place
for a drone landing pad.

There are probably a hundred similar apartment buildings all within a 10 mile
radius of Amazon. They would all be able to easily handle drone deliveries
from this small, centralized, micro-warehouse.

Can commercial drones handle straight line flying with building sized object
avoidance over a space of a couple miles? I think so.

Will they "in a few years" just like Bezos said? Absolutely.

Just because it won't work in rural south dakota or the suburbs of Detroit
Michigan, doesn't mean that it won't work somewhere.

Like the author said, Amazon trialed fresh for FIVE years before taking it out
of Seattle. What's to say they won't do the same thing with Prime Air?

(Just in case anyone is wondering, I don't work for Amazon)

~~~
aetherson
Small warehouses in big cities still cost a lot of money. Land is expensive in
big cities, and even small warehouses are pretty large.

Warehouses -- even small ones -- also need to be able to take goods IN. They
need truck-accessible streets, loading docks, and they need staff who store,
and then pick/pack/ship your goods. Small warehouses that handle high-turnover
goods need even more staff, since they need to constantly replenish themselves
(since they're small, and can't just take a hundred thousand units in once a
month, and since we're stipulating that the goods are high-turnover and leave
the warehouse quickly).

It's expensive. Amazon has wonderful warehousing and distribution, which only
goes to show that they aren't actually naïve about how expensive it is. Which
goes to show that the drone delivery thing was a publicity stunt.

Too small a warehouse, and you don't deliver the customer satisfaction that is
presumably the point of a drone delivery, because a trivial number of goods
actually get delivered to customers. (Especially since we're talking very
small goods in the first place).

~~~
InclinedPlane
> Small warehouses in big cities still cost a lot of money. Land is expensive
> in big cities, and even small warehouses are pretty large.

They don't have to be downtown.

Regardless, you're thinking about this the wrong way. As a service that must
serve everyone and deliver everything instead of as an opportunistic service,
which is a smarter way to approach the problem from a business perspective.

Amazon already has warehouses, fulfillment centers, in several major metro
areas.

Let me state that again, because it's hugely important. Amazon already has
warehouses in some cities. They have to have their FCs somewhere, and the
places where they are, like Seattle, already have a comparative advantage when
it comes to fulfillment of commonly stocked items.

This changes the problem dramatically. It transforms it from: buy high priced
land in major cities, build FCs there, set up drone operations; to: set up
drone operations in a few cities where you already have large, well stocked
warehouses, and then pilot the program opportunistically in those cities. Then
expand the program to other cities depending on how successful and profitable
the pilot program turns out to be.

This is business 101, you leverage what you've already got to mitigate risk
and reduce development and acquisition costs.

------
headShrinker
This article strikes me as a bit naive and overly cynical at the same time. I
research, build and fly "drones". There is no question the technology now
"hobby grade" will make the jump to industrial within maybe 2 years. What is
really lacking to them is areospace efficiency, and computer science. All the
most popular software and hardware to date was mostly written or built by
tinkerers and RC aficionados, not computer science and areospace industry
leading professionals.

You can get an article circulated by badmouthing the hottest tech news, but in
this case, it's just a bad misleading article with little basis in truth.

Also the government just opened 6 commercial testing zones, and the FAA just
laxed some of the regulations regarding commercial UAV experimentation and
flight. Note that these moves happened at lightening speed for the government.
Just weeks ago it was illegal for a company to fly with out FAA clearance and
a pilots license. This is going to happen. I believe Amazon or Google are the
most well positioned to make it happen.

Not only is Amazon talking about introducing drones, it's also entertaining
the idea of making UPS or FedEx strictly Business2Business enterprise, as
Amazon would be handling the final leg of delivery ultimately to the customers
door. I haven't heard anyone mention anything about this. Personally, as
bicyclist living in NYC, I can't wait until those disgusting aggressively
driven diesel delivery trucks are moved to the strap yard, replaced by the
distant buzz of a battery operated drone army.

Also to correct the inaccuracy presented in the article. The drones will be
the final leg of the package journey, not the mid term. They will fly maybe 10
miles max, with a top speed of maybe 60 mph max within a city, not, 120 miles
from city to city. It will start in one city like Amazon Fresh, and then 2 or
3 more years after that. Not every city all at once like the article
insinuates then points out would be impossible. One city with in 5 years still
makes Amazons plan a success and it makes this article completely wrong.

~~~
michaelt

      I research, build and fly "drones".
    

Great, maybe you can bring some information to the discussion.

For the type of drone you are best informed about, what is the maximum round
trip flying range, assuming you adjusted the weight of batteries to maximise
flying range and there was no wind and no worries about radio range or line of
sight?

What about if you were carrying a 1 lbs / 0.5 kg payload in the outbound
direction?

What would the round trip time and average flight speed be?

What would the retail cost of such a drone be, if I wanted to order a kit
today?

~~~
beambot
I'll add a few questions:

\- Can you ensure safe failure modes for your in-flight drones?

\- Who assumes liability when your drones crash?

\- What is the blade tip speed during operation? What precautions do you take
when flying in populated areas?

~~~
skorgu
I'm not the original asker but these seem to have obvious first-draft answers:

\- Add rotors. The demo video showed an 8-rotor drone, I can imagine that
building it as a pair of parallel quad rotors from the power supply point of
view would give you quite a bit of control even at a 50% loss. A single-engine
loss is obviously fairly small beans. I'm emphatically not an expert so this
is armchair engineering.

\- I don't know why anyone would ask this question. The answer is trivially
obvious (the operator of the drone, whichever legal entity that ends up being
modulo whatever insurance they certainly have). Obviously "it could crash" is
hardly novel in other delivery services and yet they seem to survive the
liability question without issue.

\- Probably quite dangerous. I imagine you want to fly quite high for cruising
for obstacle-avoidance and noise anyway so 90% of your distance this isn't a
problem. I think the answer here is "don't hit people" just like with existing
forms of transportation (or more realistically "be as careful about not
hitting people as your liability insurance continues to reward you for").

~~~
commandar
>Add rotors. The demo video showed an 8-rotor drone, I can imagine that
building it as a pair of parallel quad rotors from the power supply point of
view would give you quite a bit of control even at a 50% loss. A single-engine
loss is obviously fairly small beans. I'm emphatically not an expert so this
is armchair engineering.

Well, the thing about a multirotor is that a motor failure is going to
drastically throw off the stability of the aircraft. The controller would have
to be able to recognize the failure, kill the faulty rotor hub, and compensate
on the remaining motors in _very_ short order to keep the airframe from
getting so far off balance that it tumbles out of the sky.

Though, honestly, I'd think the controller or battery failing is a more likely
mode of failure than one of the brushless motors suddenly dying.

~~~
m4x
The controller is already responding to changes in balance at an extremely
high rate. How do you think these things fly in the first place?

Like an earlier poster acknowledged, the current hobby grade gear is not
really engineered with industrial use in mind, but that's a fairly simple
engineering problem which has already been solved by the groups who _are_
using drones commercially (i.e. the military)

I have no doubt what so ever that Amazon, Google etc have the engineering
chops to bring the software and hardware being used in drones up to an
industrial grade.

Don't assume that because the first thing that you thought of upon hearing
"delivery drones" is infeasible that the whole idea is unworkable. It just
needs an engineer with a little more imagination

Edit: a couple of obvious solutions to your battery/controller failure mode
would be a) use redundant controllers. They're small enough that you could
easily have two or more running in tandem and checking eachothers integrity,
and b) if you lose main battery you can autorotate down and land somewhere
reasonably safe. If you use EDFs/shrouded blades they aren't a safety issue,
and building a map of safe landing zones for a city is not a huge ask for
somebody like Google.

Now for somebody else willing to use their imagination: what do you do about
cheeky individuals interfering with your drone during delivery?

~~~
commandar
>The controller is already responding to changes in balance at an extremely
high rate. How do you think these things fly in the first place?

You really don't see how there's a huge difference between balancing thrust
between relatively equal power sources and losing so much thrust that the
aircraft is inherently unstable?

Because that's kind of a huge issue - multirotors fundamentally rely on having
power at each corner for aerodynamic stability. Even brief loss of power to
one is going to put you into a tumbling state _with no way to compensate_ for
it.

>that's a fairly simple engineering problem which has already been solved by
the groups who are using drones commercially (i.e. the military)

What multirotor UAS systems does the military have in service for reliable
flight over moderate distances?

I'd also take issue with the suggestion that controlling an aircraft which has
become unstable over an axis that you no longer have control over is "a simple
engineering problem."

>They're small enough that you could easily have two or more running in tandem
and checking eachothers integrity

I was referring to the speed controllers that convert the battery power to AC
for the brushless motors. I'd expect commercial grade ESCs to be overbuilt,
but they put out a good bit of heat that has to be engineered around. They're
also one of the more common modes of failure for the brushless motor systems
used in mutlirotors.

>It just needs an engineer with a little more imagination

This is the equivalent to saying "we're going to magic away any problems with
this idea."

EDIT:

I missed this.

> If you use EDFs

Seriously? Do you even realize how terrible a suggestion that is? EDFs are
even worse in terms of energy efficiency and they'd compound stability issues
since they have relatively poor throttle response.

But I suppose we can imagine those problems away too.

------
InclinedPlane
Nonsense? Hardly. One thing people tend to struggle with when new technology
comes around is that it has a different set of tradeoffs and
advantages/disadvantages than the current dominant technology. But that
doesn't make it inferior or impractical, just different.

Consider horses vs. automobiles, for example. Horses conveniently can be bred,
so owning a horse can potentially give you more value than just having a means
of transport or labor. Horses can also be trained for a variety of tasks, they
can get better at their job over time. Horses are also excellent at traveling
along uneven ground. They can travel along city streets or country roads and
dirt paths or through forests and open fields or even through mountain passes.
In comparison, cars, especially early cars like the model T, are inferior to
horses in a great many ways. But it turns out that the few key advantages of
automobiles are more than sufficient to make up for the down sides, which is
why automobiles won out.

Similarly, if you imagine that drones must be a 100% drop in replacement for
FedEx/UPS you'll rapidly come to the idea that the whole endeavor must be
nonsense. But if instead drones only provide a complementary service then they
can still be a feasible addition to delivery options. Even if drones only
delivered high priced orders (say, more than $1k) to businesses with special
drone landing spots it would still likely be a profitable and successful
venture. Being able to have something delivered the same day in mere hours is
a game changer in a lot of ways.

Imagine how much that would put Amazon even more into the existing business
space of, say, home depot, as a simple example. If a home builder could order
a replacement circular saw to be delivered to the work site in an hour without
having to send someone out to a store that's a big deal. And there are
countless examples of where the value of having some durable good delivered as
soon as possible is immense, and would more than justify exorbitant drone
delivery fees.

~~~
Spooky23
Great post.

Your Home Depot reference made me think of the 24x7 propane dispensers that
are in front of many Home Depots. Enter your credit card, put your old tank in
the cage, take a fresh tank and you've got propane. It costs more, but adds
convenience.

Amazon could easily partner with smaller-box retailers like CVS, Walgreen's,
supermarkets or convenience stores to make store branches drone delivery
points. If I need a Macbook Air or a circular saw now, I pay $25 and a 5
minute drive/walk to the drugstore for pickup vs. driving to the mall or
waiting two days.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Amazon already has something similar for non-drone deliveries called Amazon
Locker, which is actually pretty useful. But you make a good point. Drone
deliveries are just one way to cut down on delivery latency. The continued
existence of brick and mortar stores is a good example of the value of low
latency delivery, often at a high premium. If you can spend the money that
would have been spent on storefront rent, attendant wages, and distributed
inventory instead on drone systems then maybe in some cases it's a worthwhile
tradeoff.

------
TheCoelacanth
Correct me if I'm wrong, but they didn't propose doing same-day delivery for
all items that they sell. They proposed doing it for their most commonly sold
items. So instead of needing huge warehouse holding all of their items in
urban centers, they can keep those farther out and only put smaller warehouses
holding a smaller selection of their most commonly sold items in the urban
centers.

------
etanazir
Trucks deliver bulk from distribution hubs to small 'drone stations' and the
last mile (almost literally) would be by drone. Maybe even from a mobile drone
station, i.e. big truck with drone manager and driver who stay in the truck
unless there is a problem.

~~~
adolph
Human augmentation rather than replacement is key (at least in the early
stages). Imagine a delivery truck with a set of drones on top. As the human
drives (for now) and delivers, the human also racks up packages that the
drones can deliver. In between deliveries the drones charge from the truck and
when the truck heads back to base the drones who don't need maintenance tasks
fly to the next incoming truck.

UPS in my neighborhood has done something similar in Christmases past--they
have trucks bringing in bulk and bicycle delivery doing house by house. I
didn't notice it this year; I don't know if it was a failed experiment or if I
just missed seeing them.

War is Boring has an interesting post about using unmanned aircraft as a
weapon-truck wing-man instead of an independent operator:
[https://medium.com/war-is-boring/64b87d155545](https://medium.com/war-is-
boring/64b87d155545)

~~~
comrade_ogilvy
I think a variation of your idea is a winner. The top of the delivery truck
can have lots of instrumentation to determine whether the final approach is
safe, and help guide the landing. The human does the last 50 feet of delivery.

A computer can know exactly where the trucks are and when they will be in the
vicinity. The delivery time can be fairly accurately estimated on the spot.

In an urban environment, bikes could do the last mile, with the robots
delivered to pre-designated drop off points. A predetermined location would be
easy on the computer.

But I think your idea works better in a suburban zone. The trucks exist and
are constantly driving around. It is a question of how to re-prioritize the
work on the fly.

------
ctdonath
Some people underestimate the value of serving "I need X _now_ , take my money
already!" Small warehouses stocking high-value-density high-urgency items
(memory cards, camera batteries, etc) delivered _fast_ at high price would,
direct profit aside, generate stark raging goodwill and intense consumer
loyalty.

~~~
jaynos
Isn't it still cheaper and easier to dispatch a bike messenger from that small
warehouse instead of a drone?

~~~
comrade_ogilvy
The practical answer is probably to blend the technologies. In an urban
environment, the bikes do the last mile. Very small drop off points with tiny
specialized helipads would accept a stream of fast deliveries from the more
distant real warehouses. Since the routes would be established, the computer
technology demands would be modest.

Get the package to the drop off point in 30-60 minutes by quad-copter. Get the
package from there by bike in 30-60 minutes. There would be uncertainty based
on the availability of human messengers, but routes and delivery times can be
estimated/calculated by computer. "Estimated delivery in 79 minutes. Click
yes?"

------
JonnieCache
That sixty minutes thing will surely be remembered as the best value for money
in PR for 100 years.

~~~
guiambros
That's _exactly_ it. And more: it stole the headlines in the exact weekend
between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. How clever is that?

What's even more impressive: they hand-picked a story that is so good that
even months after the pseudo-hoax went public, you still have hundreds
(thousands?) of really smart folks on HN and other forums discussing the
feasibility of the idea, the economics, or if an hex-copter wouldn't be better
than a quad...

And just think about the wave of CS students applying for a job at Amazon,
"because I want to work on cool projects". Certainly more cost effective than
driverless cars.

Amazon Prime Air is already a success. They don't need to fly anything.

------
pjbrunet
As much as I don't want to hear drones buzzing around (would be horrible IMO)
what if Walmart starts to shut stores because the cost of doing business is
too high and they can't compete with Amazon? What if say the minimum wage
rises to $15, cost of gas rises astronomically, too many lawsuits, unions,
whatever. Robots don't sue. Remember all the businesses that were destroyed
because of Walmart's lower prices. If Amazon can deliver lower prices by
drone, grandmas everywhere might demand drone delivery for cheaper hearing aid
batteries. If Amazon can take out Walmart, maybe drone delivery is not that
far off. I hope it doesn't happen but like I heard one analyst say (regarding
drones) on Bloomberg radio: "It's not if, but when."

------
TrainedMonkey
Author pointed out three problems with drones:

1\. Battery life is insufficient. This one is true, batteries are not there
yet.

2\. Warehouses are far from target areas. This one is true as well, in order
to make drones work warehouses/dispatch centers should be fairly close by. One
solution would be to utilize hyperloop kind of system to quickly deliver
drones to where they need to go.

3\. Problem with delivering. This one is super simple. Make drone subscription
costs high and deliver to customer a drop off pad. Make a clause in prime air
agreement that you must find enough open space on private land for drop off
pad to serve as drone beacon and unload zone. Drop off pad can have RFID/other
location beacons that would let drone know exactly where it is.

TL:DR author is right, while this can be built right now - it is simply not
economical, and likely will not become economical in near future due to point
#2 above.

------
chaostheory
"everything that can be invented has been invented.", Charles H. Duell US
Patent Office Commissioner 1899

Based on history, it's always unwise to say that something futuristic can't be
done.

------
snorkel
This is just like the Segway rollout hype all over again. Segways turned out
to be real (self balancing and all, except they turned out to have two wheels
instead of one wheel) but are very niche. I'd bet drone delivery will also
exist eventually, but it will also be very niche.

------
DonGateley
Of course it will happen. The fed needs the technology for its ongoing
insurrection suppression preparation (DEA, ATF, NSA, etc.) and would have to
come out of the closet to develop and deploy a network of sufficient size to
be effective at its task. Amazon is the perfect front.

------
hkarthik
I'll bet in a short time, we'll see usage of drones inside the warehouses to
sort out packages and load them onto trucks for long hauls more efficiently
(and with less labor cost) than what's currently being done by humans.

------
asfapifb
What if instead of building warehouses, you offer to outfit most local stores
with helipads / charging stations and POS data interchange so that orders from
amazon can be fulfilled via local stores that then load and launch drones?

------
us0r
Even if it is nonsense you can't buy this kind of press. It is a success
either way.

