> 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.
> 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.
This probably isn't for cities. I was at a conference a few years back where Prime Air gave a talk. It was quite a vague talk, but admittedly it was hilarious watching Takeo Kanade grill the speaker on technical details that he refused to elaborate on. Things have no doubt moved on, but they were talking about use cases like delivering to rural areas where people have big gardens to land in. So potentially places where sending a delivery truck miles out of the way would be expensive (e.g. a 20 minute detour to one house). That's where the interesting applications of drone delivery are.
That drone is pretty big, and they're getting extra lift out of the wings which conveniently double as prop guards. Flight time is presumably at least an hour, if it can get something to a customer in half an hour (and has to get back). You'd need quite a few since each drone can therefore only make around 10-20 deliveries a day if they swap out the batteries when it lands. 30 mile round trip range is pretty decent. Also on size - you need somewhere to land it with a few metres wriggle room either side. There's no way that's going into a built up area.
There's no point doing drone delivery in urban environments, the safety case is insane and you're competing with excellent existing delivery channels.
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?
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.
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.
I don't think people fully appreciate the carefulness with which the FAA has approached this, nor the full scope of the scenarios they have considered.
If you look at the first FAA waivers to operate drones industrially -- 5 years ago! -- you will notice that all of the approved drones are military drones. Why military drones? Because the approved drones often had a decade or more of operational use in explicitly hostile environments and very poorly controlled conditions. Being able to reliably operate in those conditions was considered strong evidence they were unlikely to start falling out of the sky when operated under much better controlled environments and less risky conditions.
The challenge for many new drone builders is that their platforms are not built anywhere close to the reliability and resilience standards of military drone systems, which are typical the product of companies with proven aviation/avionics systems engineering experience and bankrolled by US defense spending. Even when they build systems that on paper meet this level of engineering, the lack of operational history and experience puts these drones on the slow path to approval.
Amazon getting the FAA to sign off on industrial use of an exotic drone airframe with no operational history strongly suggests that its safety and resilience characteristics are excellent, at least comparable to drones designed to survive military environments.
The comment is uninteresting and rightly downvoted because (1) it's been discussed to death and has nothing to do with this particular experimental drone model and (2) we already have effective legal apparatuses to deal with liability.
Neither of those are reasons to not discuss this more. We, as a society, prevent all sorts of things from happening without having to just wait for a lawsuit to settle things or whatever.
One has to actually make an argument for the liability system being insufficient. Merely pointing out risks is not enough, especially since no one here has bothered to even do an order-of-magnitude comparison between the risks and the benefits. It's just noise and emoting.
Do you really, like I mean _really_ need your stuff from Amazon same day, hours after ordering it? No, you really don't. Nobody does. It's a convenience, a nice-to-have, but is totally unnecessary.
So, I think the burden of proof lays squarely on Amazon and it's proponents of this type of service, to prove beyond any reasonable doubt the risks can be mitigated to the point where the public accepts them as a trade-off.
Having potentially 50lbs of drone fall on your car while you're driving home from work is probably not going to be acceptable... to name just one risk that will have to be proven to be minimized. Or noise levels will be controlled near neighborhoods etc... Other industries have to prove their new thing is safe and acceptable for the public... why should Amazon be any different?
Not to mention people's heads! I have faith in agencies like the FAA to keep things safe and reasonable, and where that isn't enough NIMBYs and municipal governments will pick up the slack, no doubt.
Interesting point. Maybe instead we should be using self-driving cars with drones (or something ground-based, like RC skateboards) only handling moving packages from the car to the door.
In addition to noise, I'm also concerned about visual clutter, particularly in residential areas.
The last thing I want is to add to the power lines, airplanes, etc. with the visual noise when I'm on my deck trying to enjoy nature.
Further, Amazon is a major player in the advertising space now. I'd be surprised if at some point these weren't leveraged to display ads in some format. I'm a marketer by trade, but personally that's a line I don't want crossed.
Cars, roads and trucks have been around for a century, and none of us were around to discuss that.
Also now we have a century worth of experience to apply to deciding to add new vehicles to our environment.
And finally for the most part cars, trucks etc are primarily fixed routes - roads.
We know where they are, there's planning and committees around design and disruption before they are set in place.
Drones move in a 3 dimensional space, with no set routes, and very few no fly zones.
Basically imagine a moped that can fly over your property or circle where you live looking for an address.
Not to even mention the privacy issues, most cars are still lacking in cameras, or scanning technology.
Delivery drones will need that stuff to be standard.
My main concern is the audio and video recording devices that will undoubtedly be attached to these drones (if history is any guide, likely without any disclosure).
I foresee ads for rakes when Amazon notices that there are lots of leaves in my yard.
I don't know why people think this is a good thing right now.
My first thought was "well, maybe you do need a rake". But I guess it probably can't see into your shed/garage/etc to know whether you actually have a rake or not. Ads for things you already have are such a waste.
> I have been playing with radio controlled aircraft for most of my life
RC Helis 60 Size Gas back in the old days. You had to manually control everything. You had to built it from scratch. [1] The ones they have now are so simple and easy they are no fun at all. I wonder if you feel the same way?
I am still not getting how this is possible given weather conditions and variability.
[1] Electric? Only thing like that I ever saw was at the hobby shop (remember those) and it had a power cord attached and was plugged into an extension cord and being tested out back.
Thats exactly what I'm trying to do here (sort of), I'm like 2 years in on the project and I've only just begun to actually test the thing. https://github.com/castis/currant
You are right that this thing is going to be noisy as hell. I can say this without having heard it because basic physics makes hovering craft with little propellers impossible to make quiet. Welcome to the new world of a flying buzzsaw delivering your neighbor's toothpaste at 7 AM.
No wonder they chose to play classical music over this video.
If I’m working on a drone in my yard, surrounded by buildings, the noise has a direct line to a few people. If I put that drone at 200 feet, suddenly many more people are directly exposed to that noise. Imagine how loud a UPS truck would be within a 90° cone above your bedroom. Also, consider how many more people would be affected by that noise per delivery.
But to be fair, the frequencies are quite different.
The UPS truck that delivers to my block makes a bit more noise then the average car driving down my street, parks, the driver gets out of it, and spends a couple of minutes making >20 deliveries. A human carrying cardboard boxes does not make much noise. Neither does a powered-off truck... And it's not like UPS does domestic deliveries from the back of 20-wheeler rigs.
This is orders of magnitude less noise than 20 drones, coming and going, throughout the day. (Not to mention the ones passing overhead, to deliver to the next block down...)
Yeah, but if I have enough money/income (which is a big caveat, I know) then I can have some control over the location of the UPS truck by virtue of living someplace not too close to a road.
When was the last time a UPS truck drove over your house / apartment / etc?
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I'd like to know more about the support infrastructure they imagine. Even if this doubles flight time compared to current commercial quadcopters it would still have a 40-60min total flight time thus less than half that in range. It's going to require a lot of stations (and battery changes/charging) scattered about as its not like they can launch from warehouses and reach much.
Anyone know where that video was filmed? It looks an awful lot like Eastern Washington around the Walla Walla area, but I'm sure there are other parts of the country that look similar.
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?
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.
Zero traffic congestion, close to free to operate, fulfillment in minutes? Under 1 hour order delivery? There’s obviously downsides like sound and then falling out of the sky, but getting anything under 5 pounds two orders of magnitudes faster is a big deal.
If they tried to introduce cars now, there is no way they would get through. Because they are truly ridiculous and horrible. A million deaths around the world directly, and another million due to pollution? Imagine trying to convince everyone that was a good idea.
Compared to walking dozens of miles everywhere? Remember that the only existing modes of transportation were bicycles and horse-drawn carriages. The car absolutely needed to happen to aid our progress as a civilization.
Everything looks bad in hindsight right? But it is the car that enabled the progression that makes the car impractical.
I agree. This invention does nothing of real value. Perhaps it makes you life a bit more convenient but it's the difference between ordering a pizza in 30 minutes and ordering a pizza in 10 minutes. This can't enhance human well-being- it's simply a toy for rich techies who can afford to pay a premium to get their stuff all the faster.
I wish Mr Bezos would focus on something of real value- asteroid mining and transferal of polluting industries off-world.
Are you sure that the energy cost is lower for a delivery van? Fully loaded (though presumably uncommon for residential deliveries), a commercial van will carry 4 tons and have pretty poor gas mileage. Electric vans may help, but it's still quite a lot of weight to drive around.
The drones have no driver (thus lower margins and/or a richer Amazon, neither of which are necessarily good for inequality, though it does free up more humanity from mundane tasks like delivering parcels), and can be loaded quickly and automatically. The article mentions they can carry 5 lbs, which I suspect is enough to carry a few deliveries at once. As the article mentions, 80% of their sales are less than 5 lbs.
All that said, the noise pollution is going to be horrendous. The visual pollution I don't mind so much, as it _may_ allow cities to lower the number of cars on the road (fewer people driving to run errands), though it's definitely going to feel creepy and dystopian, especially if Amazon are the only ones running these things and there isn't _extremely_ strong privacy oversight.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
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.)
Your property goes from ground level to 200 feet; above that it's effectively the domain of the FAA. I would imagine the drones would have to fly between 200 and 500 feet until directly over the delivery target otherwise they would be either violating more restricted FAA airspace or trespassing on private property (under the 200 foot boundary).
If your friend lives anywhere that’s not rural, then no, she probably isn’t allowed to shoot it down, nor should she; bullets and buckshot could end up coming down on someone else.
But, if she uses a satellite TV dish to aim the output of a magnetron at that drone, well, that’s another story.
It’s incredible, right? I don’t want to spoil it for you, but there are folks with last names like Baker, Miller, Smith, etc. that don’t even resemble food dish names! They’re occupations. Mind blown.
Used by people who've adopted those names after being assimilated into the cultures from which those names came about.
Gur Kimchi is evidently Jewish, and his name appears to be a variation of the Sephardic Jewish family name Kimhi. It evolved independently of the Korean name for their side dish, seeing as how they're from different language families
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?
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.