
Alibaba begins drone delivery trials in China - edward
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31129804
======
muxxa
I've an efficiency fantasy of them piggybacking on the roofs of trucks going
in the right direction in order to save fuel, then hopping off when the truck
starts to head in a different direction. Techno parasitism.

~~~
psb217
This is actually how (some) couriers worked in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.
They latched on to the back of passing cars/trucks with magnetic harpoons and
hitched a free ride until they needed to head another way.

~~~
Nicholas_C
Dammit, I hear about that book just about every week. I think I might finally
cave and read it.

~~~
e12e
You should, it's a great book. Published before Stephenson became (apparently)
famous enough to ignore his editors and stopped cutting down his material...
Both "Snowcrash" and "Diamond Age" are very good.

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forkandwait
Not to be a downer, but I think the whole drone delivery thing, at least for
now, nothing but a media show. Worked great for Amazon, .... (Maybe the
technology will evolve enough later to be cost effective, and tests are
important on that path.)

~~~
__jochen__
It's already happening. Imagine delivery of high-value, light goods to remote
locations, e.g. medicines in the Australian Outback, or island off the German
coast. These are examples of what has already been done.

~~~
sly010
Or imagine delivery of low-value goods to close locations. At the moment it
takes 30-60 minutes for a restaurant from 3 block away to deliver my lunch and
it includes a bicycle, a delivery guy, an elevator guy and a couple of doors
and/or doorbells. It costs a few dollars in tip.

A drone can bypass all of that inefficiency and show up in my window 60
seconds after the meal is cooked. In New York it could deliver to the fire
escape or to a special landing pads, or just hover in front of the 3rd window
on the left on the 5th floor for 30 seconds.

What happens to the illegal delivery guy living on the tip is an entirely
different question.

~~~
TeMPOraL
That's the one case I can't imagine working any time soon - drones in the
cities. To-door delivery is a fine dream when you live in a suburb and have
your own garden, but in a city? What they're going to do with that pizza?
Throw it through the window (if they even knew the right one)? Land on a roof
and risk someone else snatching the cargo?

Not saying it's impossible, but I see tons of additional concerns, both
practical and related to safety.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Cities have plenty of safe places to fly (over streets for instance; or over
roofs) but the final contact issue is real. How about: don't come down until
signaled by a smartphone, then home in on the gps location.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Over streets is one of the least safe place to fly - imagine a 10km brick
falling at 40km/h into incoming traffic or a group of pedestrians. As for the
final contact, your average quadcopter will have like 10-20 minutes of flight
time tops; it can't just wait for you to signal it - being even a minute late
could mean the drone won't make it back to a charging station.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Very true today. Batteries will get better, or maybe metal-air with huge
capacity. OR, it could deploy a balloon and wait for the signal :)

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Derpdiherp
I'm still not convinced by delivery by drone. There's many problems that have
yet to be solved, some have obvious solutions that are still none trivial to
implement - others at least in my mind are very much an issue.

So far as none trivial but solvable problems - there's going to have to be
communication with all vendors operating delivery drones. Each drone will have
to be aware of other drones by other companies and their flight-paths in the
area and avoid collisions.

The biggest problem that I can see is the customer and public themselves. What
is to stop someone stealing drones? Or plain vandalism of them? Follow it in a
car to it's destination and you know it's going to have to come low enough
down for a quick grab. Otherwise if there's some controlled drop off point,
air rifles or crossbows or other publicly available small projectile weapons.

~~~
gutnor
The cost of operating those is also questionable, especially in China.

It is profitable to have pizza hand-delivered in the US/Europe where labor
cost is high. In China, I wonder how that is even possible.

~~~
puranjay
Chinese cities are notoriously expensive. Cheap labor is limited to rural
areas and smaller towns where most of the huge factories are located.

The wages in a city like Shanghai, while obviously not comparable to a city
like NYC, are high enough to warrant a drone solution.

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kailuowang
The vast majority of the Chinese population with meaningful consumption power
live in hire rise apartment buildings in the cities. So if you can't drop the
package in a yard, how do you deliver by drone?

~~~
zorked
Well, keep the windows open :)

~~~
hyperion2010
That lets the smog in.

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aioprisan
I wonder if China's more lax regulations aren't a big win for Alibaba and
improves their ability to go to market faster than Amazon will with drove
delivery.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
How is the communist regime's governance in China "lax?" There's probably
significant worry on the part of the CCP to keep drones controlled as they may
see and record things that are politically inconvenient for this autocratic
regime like political prisoners being abused or heavy-handed riot police
action.

Chinese aerospace laws, from a casual googling, seem to be very strict as
well, and geared towards favoritism for their military.

If drones take off anywhere, I imagine it will be in the most transparent
countries, like the ultra-liberal Scandinavian democracies. I doubt drones are
autocrat friendly for obvious reasons. I also imagine there's a nice middle
ground between planes and rc hobbyists with defined paths and lots of rules
that will eventually shake-out in many countries. Drone delivery just makes a
lot of sense ,perhaps not so much with toothpaste, but with, say blood or
organ delivery where a proper helicopter costs many times more and an accident
is lethal. A drone accident is just a lost resource.

~~~
rsynnott
Chinese regulations are often very strict. And often also very, very poorly-
enforced, unless there's sufficient public unhappiness about them.

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auganov
The drone in this stunt is operated by YuanTong, a parcel delivery company,
not Alibaba. Also Alibaba does not (generally?) maintain distribution centers
or hold inventory. So from a strategic perspective drones don't mean to
Alibaba what they could to Amazon.

~~~
pagnotta
You are right, Alibaba doesn't even sell anything, they are like e-bay, just
connect the buyer to the seller. As far as I know Alibaba also doesn't have a
delivery service, ShungFeng Express is the most used delivery company. The
chinese Amazon is YiHaoDian(360buy), they sell their own things and they have
their own delivery operation.

~~~
billconan
Alibaba owns [http://www.tmall.com/](http://www.tmall.com/), which is amazon-
like.

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IanDrake
Just wait until the drone bumps into someone...

[https://www.google.com/search?q=quadcopter+injuries&num=50&e...](https://www.google.com/search?q=quadcopter+injuries&num=50&espv=2&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=R4_SVJyCA5D9oAShroGICw&ved=0CAgQ_AUoAQ&biw=1280&bih=939)

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sly010
Whenever I see drone delivery, I always see quadrocopters. Aren't octocopters
more safe (they can still fly with 7 rotors)? Intuitively they can also carry
more load. It should be a very simple decision considering that the main
objection against drones is safety.

~~~
Nicholas_C
I thought quadcopter battery life was a prohibitive factor as well. From what
I've read casually most have a battery life of 5 to 10 minutes.

~~~
mod
Here's one over an hour and a half:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ScZ8zDsVvk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ScZ8zDsVvk)

It's definitely an issue, especially with payloads, but it's feasible to work
around it. I think you can keep strapping on batteries for quite a while, too
--the lift of some of these machines is incredible.

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iamleppert
It's......really weird. Solving a problem that doesn't exist. Tea? Really?
Asian cultures as so different and seem weird to me with this kind of
technology related announcements.

~~~
Panoramix
Tea is an obvious choice to start with this. Huge demand, extremely
lightweight, reasonably priced. Nothing "weird" about it.

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6stringmerc
Are they using auto pilot or stick and yoke? Just curious, as the article
mentions in the conclusion this isn't addressed. Recent regional news would
indicate this may be a valid concern...well, at least from a cold-blooded
investor standpoint (liability vs. profitability).

~~~
kleer001
Great question, fundamental really. If it's auto pilot what's to stop some
malicious hacker from diverting the drones. If it's manual how much are the
pilots getting paid and are they bonded? Seems like a huge can of worms to me.

~~~
gatehouse
My guess is that they are using human operators, and they probably have a
retrieval squad on standby in case they lose contact. The regulatory issues I
couldn't begin to guess.

The goal at this stage would be to validate the business model and to collect
flight data and get a sense of the operational requirements. If it works and
they want to develop an autopilot, they will then have all the flight data,
landing zone choices and issues, and trained operators to consult.

~~~
6stringmerc
Nicely put; especially with respect to the business model. It almost seems
that being competitive with traditional methods (bicycle, scooter, truck)
almost will require more investment than can be expected as a return on
capital. If human capital is very cheap in the markets for delivery
(assumption) then establishing a break-even / profit point is genuinely of
concern.

Also, I can't help but recall seeing pictures of some cities with smog so bad
I wonder if drone pilots would even be able to see at certain altitudes.
Limited scenario, I know, but seems to correspond with population density.
Dense population seems kind of the ideal market, so, yeah, just a thought.

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thalesmello
How big is Alibaba inside China? Just like Amazon in the USA, the go-to place
for people to buy stuff online? Disclaimer: I live in Brazil, and I use
Alibaba only to buy inexpensive stuff, so that's the picture I have of the
company.

~~~
pagnotta
Alibaba is like MercadoLivre, they don't sell anything. They pretty dominant,
in China they have TaoBao, an e-bay like, TianMao, also like e-bay, but more
selected, more expensive to open a shop in it, and more brand-oriented than
TaoBao, and finally they have Alibaba China, that is a B2B site, it means real
wholesale. Oh, there is also Alipay, huge, it is the Paypal in China, people
here use it even to pay 10 bucks to a friend when sharing a restaurant bill, a
guy just taps his mobile phone and send the 10 bucks to his friend that is
sitting just across from him, it's funny. There is also Alimama, advertising
market. The thing is that in Brazil (I'm a brazilian too!) the e-commerce is
still far from the level it has reached in China. My wife (chinese) buys
everything in the internet, even noodles, milk, oil, soap,her clothes, her
Lenovo laptop, her Iphone6, everything from the internet. She can't spent a
day without buying at least a pair of socks from the internet. Brazil lacked a
good payment system, but now with PagSeguro i guess things will improve. But
there is also the expensive delivery in Brazil, in China it's ridiculously
cheap, like you pay 30 Reais to send a 5 kilos pack 2000 Kilometer away to the
other side of the country within 24 hours!!

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zirkonit
A big win for BABA.

I wonder what is the difference in efficiency between drone delivery and the
old-fashioned truck logistics, taking into account speed, carbon emissions,
human factor etc – I wouldn't be surprised if 5x or 10x is the factor.

------
web007
It feels like Alibaba fell for Amazon's joke.

I wonder how often this happens for companies, where a PR stunt or vaporware
press release from company A convinces company B to expend resources to "beat
them to market".

~~~
TeMPOraL
That's how we got StarCraft, and thus modern RTS games. Someone created a fake
rendered demo at E3 conference and Blizzard fell for the trick; they believed
the awesome thing they saw is real, and they worked their butts off to beat
it.

~~~
adrianpike
Got any citations on that? Warcraft, Dune II, etc. all came out way before
Starcraft, and I'm pretty sure Blizzard was building SC pretty quick on the
heels of WC2.

~~~
mercer
I think it was a Gamasutra article, but I remember that it wasn't so much that
they made Starcraft because of the demo, but rather that they made it a lot
_better_ after seeing this fake demo.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Not Gamasutra, it came directly from one of StarCraft's developers blog. Per
[0], StarCraft was supposed to be the "Warcraft in Space" it didn't turn out
to be, and it was meant as a quick project to fill the publishing gap. [1]
Explains the fake demo thing and its influence on StarCraft development in
lenghth.

A key quote:

"At some point I talked with Mark and Patrick about how Dominion Storm knocked
us on our heels, and they let us in on Ion Storm’s dirty little secret: the
entire demo was a pre-rendered movie, and the people who showed the “demo”
were just pretending to play the game! It would be an understatement to say
that we were gobsmacked; we had been duped into a rebooting StarCraft, which
ultimately led it to be considered “the defining game of its genre. It is the
standard by which all real-time strategy games are judged” (GameSpot)."

[0] - [http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-
to-s...](http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-starcraft)

[1] - [http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/starcraft-orcs-in-space-
go-d...](http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/starcraft-orcs-in-space-go-down-in-
flames)

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dharma1
First thoughts.. wonder what flight controller they're using? Ardupilot? And
those props look pretty small for lifting much!

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mephi5t0
Chinese started to stock up on heavy duty slingshots...

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harisamin
guess they beat Amazon to it :)

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engendered
One inevitable business area is in anti-drone system, particularly in drone-
capture systems (e.g. intercept and actually "capture" the drone and its cargo
for forensics, etc). If you made such a system right now, you'd immediately
have orders from the White House, other high security locations, and
eventually the wealthy, etc.

And of course, stealing from delivery drones is going to become a thing.

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CmonDev
Reminds of me of this (copying service/product before "original" gets
released):

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada#iPhone_controversy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada#iPhone_controversy)

