
Amazon Unveils Futuristic Helicopter-Plane Hybrid Drone for Deliveries - jason_zig
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-05/amazon-poised-to-test-chopper-plane-mashup-for-drone-deliveries
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consumer451
> Its propellers have a slight S-curve designed to lower their noise to make
> them more acceptable for use in populated neighborhoods, Kimchi said. The
> craft is far more stable in high winds than more traditional drones, he
> said.

Noise is my main concern with drone delivery networks. I have been playing
with radio controlled aircraft for most of my life. I see drone delivery as
inevitable, but living near a noisy drone delivery route could really lower
quality of life for the people on the ground.

~~~
vkou
> Noise is my main concern with drone delivery networks.

What about 20-50 lb flying machines falling onto sidewalks, roofs, and
streets?

You don't see amateur RC aviation enthusiasts flying their model airplanes in
the middle of the city, and I sure as hell don't want to see a corporation
doing this on an industrial scale.

Why not ground-based drone delivery?

~~~
throwaway5752
Why are you downvoted? Safety is a thousand times more concerning - the drones
will mechanically fail, they will hit bad weather, they will collide with
birds, there will be new drone delivery market entrants and will need
coordination across systems... If a drone fails at an expected operating
altitude, it can kill someone easily on the ground. If it fails at height over
a highway, what if it kills a bus driver or causes a tractor trailer to lose
control? What if they hit electric lines? What else can go in flight corridors
at the same altitudes? Do they container chemicals or voltages that first
responders have to be aware of?

~~~
zjaffee
There's a reason why it's taking so long for Amazon to get FAA approval for
drone delivery and this is exactly why. There are people in important places
asking these sorts of questions already.

My guess personally, is that drone delivery will ultimately just be a tool for
a self driving truck to get the package from the truck to the door. Drones are
not nearly good enough as it stands today to do end to end deliveries at an
industrial scale outside of maybe a few rural areas.

~~~
greenburger
The same people in important places that approved the 737 Max?

~~~
pwinnski
In the sense that they are human, yes. Even in the sense that they work for
the government, which narrows the pool to 20,000,000+

But also, no. Not the same people.

~~~
greenburger
I get your point but the relevant agency division FAA AVS employees 7,200
people [0]. Fewer than that are involved in certifying aircraft safety.
Agencies like all other human groups have cultures.

[0]
[https://www.faa.gov/about/plans_reports/congress/media/fy17_...](https://www.faa.gov/about/plans_reports/congress/media/fy17_avs_wfp_final.pdf)

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ben7799
This is a really novel design.. few moving parts, and solves the main issue
with multirotor drones.. namely that they are incredibly inefficient in terms
of power required to fly.

When the initial hype about Amazon drone delivery came out I remember saying
it wouldn't work cause multi-rotor drones are so inefficient.

This will make it work... it'll use a fraction of the electricity if it
cruises in "plane mode".

If the max Payload is 5lbs I doubt it's going to weigh 50lbs. Maybe 10-20lbs,
but the battery weight is the big thing.

~~~
Alupis
> it'll use a fraction of the electricity if it cruises in "plane mode".

That'll depend how efficient the wing is. Usually there's trade-offs when
doing a hybrid design (see V-22 Osprey).

Perhaps the trade-off is still a net benefit in that configuration though...

> If the max Payload is 5lbs I doubt it's going to weigh 50lbs. Maybe 10-20lbs

Not sure, in my RC flying experience, these aircraft can't lift much weight at
all. Ounces are a serious concern, let alone pounds. Adding 1/4 extra weight
is a big deal for something this small and without large wings to generate
lift - the rotors are going to have to do a lot of work to get off the ground.

It'll probably need to be a pretty big aircraft to have enough battery
carrying capacity to guarantee a safe round-trip with possible complications
with wind, loiter time for safe landing, obstacle avoidance, etc, and big
enough to support the 5lbs load without impacting flight characteristics too
much.

~~~
ben7799
For sure you are right about it having a lot of challenges and the total
weight vs battery weight vs payload weight is a huge one.

But remember the wing design is competing against "no wing" so it is easy to
be a huge improvement. Normal drones don't really get to throttle down and
they have to do all their flight controls through engine speed adjustments.
Normal flight controls use almost no power & when this thing builds up a head
of steam it will be able to throttle back to cruise.

It looks like a closed edge biplane when it transitions.. the closed edges
help efficiency. It can probably be optimized for a very narrow speed range as
well so I bet they can come up with a very nice airfoil design.

~~~
Alupis
> It looks like a closed edge biplane when it transitions.. the closed edges
> help efficiency

Perhaps. It could also be mostly to stabilize the aircraft in forward flight,
since that's more efficient by itself with a "pulling" rotor than a
traditional quad-copter setup (using differential thrust from each motor to
control movement and stability).

The closed wing doesn't look very large, so we'll have to see just how much
lift they actually get out of it. The airfoil design may not generate much or
any lift but instead just be used for control, such as a typical
horizontal/vertical stabilizer of an aircraft.

Or perhaps it does generate some lift and helps a bit. Just looks rather small
for that role, but I could be wrong. RC aircraft often defy principles that
apply to their full-sized brethren.

> (FTA): Amazon declined to release some specifics on the device, citing trade
> secrets

I guess we'll just have to wait for some more specifics.

~~~
ben7799
I'm not sure why they would bother with the effort of this if the wing wasn't
generating lift.

~~~
Alupis
I don't know, just speculating it's not providing much lift with it being so
small. But, it definitely would help stabilize the aircraft in it's forward
flight configuration. You're probably right in that it's doing both.

Was hoping they'd release more details. It's not like RC aircraft have much
secret sauce to them... other than Amazon's proprietary package compartment.

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aresant
Awesome video of the drone -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HJtmx5f1Fc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HJtmx5f1Fc)

~~~
pwned1
Unfortunately no audio of the drone itself so we can judge its noisiness.

~~~
derekp7
Even if you had audio, still can't judge the noise level unless there is a
reference sound there too. Such as general highway noise.

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adamwong246
Cool but I can't understand why you'd need such a delivery system? MAYBE you
can imagine a scenario where you need to air lift a vial of snake anti-venom
very quickly but that's a fantastical, far edge-case. Theres simply no reason
that an auto-automobile can't handle 99% of deliveries.

Drones can't go that far. They can only carry tiny payloads. They use a ton of
energy just to hover. And lastly- they are much more dangerous than ground-
based transport, for the simple reason that _they can fall from the sky_.

Whats to be gained by putting deliveries in the air?

~~~
mcqueenjordan
Sorry to be blunt, but you're speaking from ignorance. Take a look at
statistics for cars and re-think your position on the relative safety of the
two modes of transporting goods.

~~~
tjbarkley
I believe he's talking about the future when automonomous cars are
commonplace.

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gdcohen
Curious how well it will deal with locating the correct place at the correct
house to deliver the package? One way to achieve this might be to only use the
drone after a human delivery person has delivered a package and tagged in
Amazon's map database where packages should be dropped. Or perhaps the house
resident uploads a picture of their house with the drop location?

~~~
ivv
Maybe residents would place beacons where they want the drones to land?

~~~
glitchc
Indeed, the beacon is a landing pad that customers place in their front or
backyards (ideally back). See (3) in the following link:

[https://www.digitalspy.com/tech/a820748/amazon-prime-air-
dro...](https://www.digitalspy.com/tech/a820748/amazon-prime-air-drone-
delivery-service/)

As for which house, that's via geocoding (convert postal code to GPS).
Reasonably accurate for North America, unclear about other parts of the world.

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chroem-
The annular wing is an interesting touch. It should reduce induced drag at the
low Reynolds numbers these drones typically fly at, by eliminating the wingtip
vortices. I was working on a very similar design for a while, and I placed the
props at the wingtips to cancel the vortices instead.

Also it would be interesting to see what their power electronics look like.
You get a 20x reduction in thrust demands by going from hover to flight mode,
but the problem is that the efficiency of brushless motors also tends to be
absolutely dreadful when you run them at 5% throttle.

~~~
honopu
would it be possible to have 3 of each motor.. the one at low and the one at
high.. it seems like in theory you could run all 6 to take off, but let them
coast when "flying" versus gaining altitude?

~~~
mveety
That's absolutely doable, though you would have to prevent the inactive props
from spinning and/or feather them to reduce drag. I don't really see variable
pitch props on these though, the weight and complexity penalty would probably
be excessive.

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martythemaniak
[https://blog.aboutamazon.com/transportation/a-drone-
program-...](https://blog.aboutamazon.com/transportation/a-drone-program-
taking-flight)

Lots of talk about vision, no mention of LIDAR. Computer vision is getting
better faster than LIDAR is getting cheaper, expect a lidar-less future.

~~~
alehul
LIDAR provides an additional layer of safety that seems well worth the
marginal cost for those producing self-driving cars, where human lives are at
stake, even if not applicable to delivery drones.

Do you believe that the future is LIDAR-less, or that the delivery drone
future is LIDAR-less?

~~~
martythemaniak
Did you see the picture of this drone? Do you think it's incapable of killing
someone?

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jpm_sd
This is very clever, but clever usually loses out to practical in the end.
Zipline[0] has a delivery drone with even fewer moving parts! It looks an
awful lot like an airplane.

[0] [https://flyzipline.com/](https://flyzipline.com/)

~~~
IshKebab
That doesn't look like a very practical way to drop deliveries for an
individual house.

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m0zg
I'd understand the use of this in very spread-out rural areas, but for dense
urban areas this is nothing more than a PR exercise to create headlines and
improve hiring. Sort of like "self driving cars" and "AI" for Google. You go
there to work on exciting stuff and end up getting assigned to some bullshit
godforsaken backend nobody wants to work on.

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NegativeLatency
I haven't seen a design quite like this before, but it seems like a natural
hybrid of existing Tail-sitter planes and the current popular drone
configuration.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tail-
sitter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tail-sitter)

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inamberclad
Very smart design. No moving parts other than the motors.

Still, hitting one of these in a 152 could be fatal. Pilots are wary of drones
for a reason. However, I think they'd be more receptive to the idea of Amazon
using them than a random person (assuming Amazon cooperates with the FAA).

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Ericson2314
Ugh I hate designing around the stupidity of suburbs. Pnumatic tubes in dense
cities: so much more efficient.

It's cool but only if you stop thinking how all of this is a hack around the
utter failure of planning at any interesting scale in gsi country.

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bracobama
Could someone elaborate on what the use cases would be for something like
this? I understand it will carry small items you buy off Amazon prime but that
can't be the end of the roadmap for drone based delivery, can it?

~~~
cagenut
walgreens has ~10,000 locations of ~10,000 square feet of products that are
overwhelmingly under 5lbs and does ~20B/year in revenue.

whoever solves drone delivery will disrupt the convenience store market. its
right there in the name.

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AstroChimpHam
Posting about how they're going to take over delivery while being investigated
for antitrust stuff is an interesting choice.

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cwkoss
Ok Google, "how do I build a faraday net for catching drones and preventing
transmission after catch?"

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mbostleman
Are these allowed to fly over my property? And if so, am I allowed to shoot it
down? Asking for a friend.

~~~
mft_
Does your friend also object to planes flying over their property?

(I would point out that the main reason people have objected to drones flying
over their property is privacy: up to now, the only use-case for a drone is
remote viewing – which some would find creepy/intrusive. I would posit that
now drones can theoretically offer tangible real-world benefits --e.g. parcel
delivery-- this will gradually fade out as an objection for most people - just
as most people would tolerate a postman delivering letters to their house.)

~~~
mbostleman
No, because they are 30k feet off the deck and, more importantly obviously,
contain people.

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bazooka_penguin
Wait, this guy's family name is seriously Kimchi? The drone is cool but
learning Kimchi is a surname is blowing my mind

~~~
GorgeRonde
I don't get the reference, would you mind explaining? On a related note, I've
always been baffled by Coursera founder & ML fame Andrew Ng's name. How am I
supposed to pronounced it?

~~~
gamegoblin
"Ng" is pronounced somewhat like the "ung" in "sung" but with the vowel
shortened.

