This made me think about self driving cars and whether its possible to make a self driving delivery van or truck - able to handle bulkier / heavier loads and all weather conditions.
Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design
121–130 of 170 posts
Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design
#122I 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.
OTOH, I feel like if people today proposed that trucks leave unattended packages outside people's door, it would be dismissed as unworkable. But it happens constantly with minimal problems. There aren't as many bad people in the world as some people think.
I've got a 100% theft rate for unattended packages in the past 90 days.
Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design
#123I'm really curious how this beats a amazon owned delivery truck? Serious question. Economically and at scale, it seems like both the truck and drone are actually pretty cheap. Speed of delivery and at scale, the only way the drone is faster is if there is a warehouse in each city and your item is stocked. Otherwise, the bottleneck in delivery time is the long distance shipping. Feasibility and at scale, the truck see…
To be economical, the truck would have to be relatively full, which means dozens of dropoffs, which means the average delivery time is measured in hours, not minutes. With a whole bunch of drones, you can do all those deliveries in parallel.
Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design
#124My major takeaway is that they are trying to push as close to instant delivery as possible (30 minutes seems like pretty remarkable goal). Potentially taking out the delivery service middleman is also good. I have my doubts (regulation, security concerns, social doubt a la Google glass) but overall it seems like a good long term strategy to try this. If they ever come close to hitting the 30 minute delivery it also o…
> If they ever come close to hitting the 30 minute delivery it also opens up the entire food delivery industry as a potential Amazon extension. Buying one of these "premade meal delivery" startups could also be an option.
This is my thinking as well. I'm actually surprised they haven't started a small project in a specific area where they're delivering hot meals. It feels like they want to, eventually, sell everything possible to people.
I would actually be surprised if they don't, eventually, buy several of these start-ups around prepared food delivery.
Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design
#125Love that they got Jeremy Clarkson from Top Gear fame to do the video. I'm guessing he likely had a hand in writing the copy as well.
Amazon signed Jeremy to do his new show on Amazon Prime, so I'm expecting to see more Jeremy/Amazon promotion going on.
Violent jerks have no place in a civilized society.
Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design
#126Here'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 believe your scenarios (especially the "truck dispenser") address the market Amazon has in mind: the suburbia. If you notice, both video examples show the drone delivering at a house. It seems obvious that an urban setting is difficult to address. And actually delivery costs are higher in the suburbs, due to population spread, than in the cities. The interesting thing is how do UPS/FedEx/USPS feel about this, consi…
I was under the impression that UPS/FedEx are going to merge to form UP/Ex, which will utilize railgun launchers and aerodynamically-self-steering packaging to deliver anywhere in a 100-mile radius from a single facility?
Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
The drone could hover over the sidewalk in front of a building, you could signal it with your smartphone similar to how the sign is used in the first video. The drone could then drop the package or it could have a mechanism that allows you to pull the package from the drone while it's in the air above you.
Heh - have you ever been close to a quadcopter capable of carrying a 2lb payload for 20+ minutes? It's pretty much 4 carbon fibre lawnmower blades thrashing around in the air. I'm not getting anywhere near close enough to remove a payload from one while it's attempting to keep a stationary hover in an area of poor gps reception. I'm reasonably careless with my little quads (~350g with 5 inch plastic props spun by 220…
Good point, but Amazon's drones are probably going to be propelled by ducted fans for just this reason.
Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design
#128My major takeaway is that they are trying to push as close to instant delivery as possible (30 minutes seems like pretty remarkable goal). Potentially taking out the delivery service middleman is also good. I have my doubts (regulation, security concerns, social doubt a la Google glass) but overall it seems like a good long term strategy to try this. If they ever come close to hitting the 30 minute delivery it also o…
Bingo on the food. Literally none of these food delivery startups will be able to compete with the speed, price, cash, and logistics infrastructure Amazon will be able to bring to the table for that area.
Delivery people, like cab/Uber drivers are service industries chugging along on borrowed time until their jobs can be fully automated.
Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design
#129My major takeaway is that they are trying to push as close to instant delivery as possible (30 minutes seems like pretty remarkable goal). Potentially taking out the delivery service middleman is also good. I have my doubts (regulation, security concerns, social doubt a la Google glass) but overall it seems like a good long term strategy to try this. If they ever come close to hitting the 30 minute delivery it also o…
Amazon already does meal delivery in Seattle.
Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design
#130Here'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…
As a one time hooliganish teenager, I wonder if these will become targets for slingshots (or more sophisticated surface-to-air weapons).
Did you shoot at cars with a slingshot?