41–50 of 170 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And mess with your neighbor's life by placing your own landing placards in your fenced-off backyard.
How does this "mess with your neighbor's life"? I wouldn't see this being a huge concern unless you happened to place 4 or 5 orders a day.
I wonder how can delivery with drones be more economically effective than with cars and drivers, with "distances of 10 miles or more"? Which, if I'm not mistaken, still somewhat exceeds capabilities of today's drones.
People are expensive.
Does anyone else think that underground tunnels are a superior way to solve the last few miles problem? Tunnels about 1 foot in diameter with little wheeled vehicles pushing around payloads of takeaway food, groceries , parcels at reasonable speed with control computers determining routing and stopping collisions. A functioning network of this type would be more valuable than power or cable utility networks, and hori…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People are expensive.
They're not that expensive and are very flexible dealing with the very analog common-sense-requiring situation that is dropping off a package.
Here's what I think is more likely: A small regional airport is taken over by Amazon. They build hangars and warehouses onsite. It's ramped up to land and fly a big turbine-powered mothership every five minutes. The warehouse dispatches packages to stacks of delivery drones like the one pictured in the video. The mothership loads the delivery drones in order. The motherships take off regularly, and then as the mother…
I assume this is for bigger cities though. In Chicago you can get to over 2 million people within 6 miles as the crow flies. If you can dodge powerless and buildings it seems reasonable...
Where I live is probably high enough density to make this idea work, but there's not enough landing space I think: https://www.google.com.au/maps/@-33.9038146,151.1761515,327m...
Does anyone else think that underground tunnels are a superior way to solve the last few miles problem? Tunnels about 1 foot in diameter with little wheeled vehicles pushing around payloads of takeaway food, groceries , parcels at reasonable speed with control computers determining routing and stopping collisions. A functioning network of this type would be more valuable than power or cable utility networks, and hori…
More likely than not, these drones are for the rural last mile problem, where drivers aren't worth the cost. In that case tunnels wouldn't be worth the cost.
Here's what I think is more likely: A small regional airport is taken over by Amazon. They build hangars and warehouses onsite. It's ramped up to land and fly a big turbine-powered mothership every five minutes. The warehouse dispatches packages to stacks of delivery drones like the one pictured in the video. The mothership loads the delivery drones in order. The motherships take off regularly, and then as the mother…
I agree with the last one, but ground delivery robots would make way more sense. I don't know about 30-60 minutes, however. The soccer shoe emergency can't really be that big of a market. Emergency medicine by drone delivery I get, but the reason people go shopping nowadays is either grocery or an excuse to get out of the house. Drones are never going to eliminate the excuse to get out of the house factor.
Surely they could just walk down to their local video rental store, not that many people really need to watch something right now!
But once something like BitTorrent & Netflix happens it becomes the new expectation. I think something like drone delivery or delivery via autonomous vehicles is going to similarly change the market for the delivery of physical goods.
I think there's gonna be alot of teenage pranks and destruction. People setting the landing spot in the water or people stealing them with nets. Not sure if much recourse unless there camera footage or gps locator.
This is the standard fear response to new technologies. Uber: how can you get in a car with a stranger? Airbnb: Even Paul Graham said "are you nuts?". Self driving cars: but what if people take advantage of it's collision avoidance abilities to walk in front? etc. etc. The fact is, most people are not malicious, life goes on anyway, and the risk of vandalism is quantifiable and included in the cost of doing business.…
Here's what I think is more likely: A small regional airport is taken over by Amazon. They build hangars and warehouses onsite. It's ramped up to land and fly a big turbine-powered mothership every five minutes. The warehouse dispatches packages to stacks of delivery drones like the one pictured in the video. The mothership loads the delivery drones in order. The motherships take off regularly, and then as the mother…
It seems plausible that by the time (i.e. in a few years) Amazon gets regulatory support for its delivery drones in a suburban community that it'll have saturated urban delivery markets in the US and will be ready to build warehouses in the suburbs.
Cue Amazon's PR firm trying to win 'cyber-monday'. Whether or not Amazon ever delivers packages with drones, the ROI on the drone R&D is massive simply based on how much attention it draws each year on cyber monday.
This drone stuff even feels like a distraction so that nobody notices what Amazon is actually up to. It's currently so far from useful, but it does generate a lot of PR for Amazon, and the timing is not at all subtle.