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Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

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Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

#161

Post by TheCoelacanth »

ck2 wrote: post #152
hiddencost wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha. You must live somewhere pretty crazy if you expect that much violence and theft. People don't randomly attack everything. Sure, there'll be some losses, but that's true of any business, plus you'll have the theft on camera and just stop delivering to those neighborhoods. Compare the cost of drone loss to UPS' cost due to accidents. It would take an insane amount of effort to steal that many drones.

Yes I live in a low-incoming neighborhood and everything gets destroyed by unsupervised kids and teenagers that run around after school before parents get home (and some even after parents are home). But I also live near college student housing and they pretty much do something similar with their drinking and partying. Just like UPS cannot leave packages for me here, I couldn't get drone delivery either. Not everyone…

Low income areas also conveniently (for Amazon) have lower amounts of money to spend, so they are a much less desirable location to provide a service like this. They wouldn't have to provide this service everywhere for it to make sense to do it in some places.

Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

#162

Post by varelse »

shpx wrote: post #132
toyg wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a pic of your neighbour's QR, print a copy, profit.

Wait 40 minutes, don't get package, email support, they review footage/delivery data, see drone going to your neighbor, press charges for petty theft.

Did I say anything about keeping or even opening the packages? If the drone is using some sort of convnet or HOG to detect the landing pad, I can only imagine hilarity would ensue if its visual field were saturated with multiple copies of the target image, a sort of visual DDoS if you will...

Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

#163

Post by marssaxman »

toyg wrote: post #97
blazespin wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One word (well, acronym): DIY. Middle-class suburban dad is trying to fix the newly-bought house, but he's constantly running out of the right size of screws and/or stuff he didn't even know he needed. At the moment that scenario results in a a lot of trips to the hardware store, but cheap 60-minute deliveries would change it for the better. Neonatal supplies, cleaning supplies, you name it -- the sort of thing you r…

I drove to the hardware store three times during the course of a single plumbing project yesterday. Each time, I bought everything I thought I would need to finish the rest of the project! I'm not even in the suburbs, I'm right in the middle of Seattle. I definitely would have paid extra for drone delivery instead of making that third trip, because I was really tired of driving across town at that point.

Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

#164

Post by mapt »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #98
mapt wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drones have got to get back in addition to getting to the target, and you only get 30 minutes if most/all of your payload is dedicated to battery. The drone has a fairly short range while fully loaded, and a lot longer range while empty.

86% of Amazon's deliveries are under 5lbs AND a glider style drone has way longer flight times than a traditional quad/octocopter.

5lbs is a large number in this context.

Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

#165

Post by scott_karana »

vektyr wrote: post #11
varelse wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And mess with your neighbor's life by placing your own landing placards in your fenced-off backyard.

I assume that could be prevented by using QR codes or something.

This fails if:

1) If you can see over the fence...

2) If it shows up in Google Maps ;)

#2 might be implausible now, but if people get really accustomed to this, I guarantee that some handymen are going to tile/spraypaint large, permanent drop points in their yards.

Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

#166

Post by toomuchtodo »

thinkling wrote: post #118
mschuster91 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USPS won't care, their (legally protected) business is shipping letters.

USPS was worried enough to agree to start delivering packages for Amazon on Sundays, which must've required some interesting negotiations with their unions.

Sunday delivery workers are paid just above minimum wage and are non-union.

Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

#167

Post by mnglkhn2 »

mnglkhn2 wrote: post #91
mapt wrote: post #22

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 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…

Based on a comment in this thread which suggested that USPS would be a prime (no pun intended :) ) candidate for a partnership, especially due to the existing real-estate infrastructure. If we think about it: USPS can very easily deliver letters/magazines using Amazon's service.

What if Amazon soon will develop the AWS-of-postal-delivery infrastructure?!

Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

#169

Post by TrevorJ »

azernik wrote: post #86
TrevorJ wrote: post #82

Thinking about it a lot, and I think the simpler way to solve the same problem would be shipping container sized package 'vending machines'. These could be distributed anywhere a couple parking spaces worth of land could be rented. You could either pick up your items yourself, or pickups could be handled via an "uber for packages" type model. The advantage of a system like that would be how quickly it could change ba…

It's called Amazon Locker, and it's existed for years.

Amazon locker just swaps the last step in the delivery to a central location. I'm talking about micro-warehouses that could easily and quickly distributed.

Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

#170

Post by brianwawok »

ghaff wrote: post #157
giarc wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know why medic-vac helicopters exist? Not necessarily because they move faster than an ambulance, but because they can travel as the crow flies. Even if a drone and a human delivery driver cost the same, a human could never come close to the delivery speed of a drone simply because they can fly over stop signs, stop lights, inefficient road design and get to the home the fastest. And for Amazon, that is the va…

Yes and medic-vac helicopters also exist because they're responding to genuine emergencies which justifies both the expense and any externalities (e.g. noise and marginal danger) associated with their flying over houses etc. to save a few minutes. Sending flocks of flying vehicles over houses to deliver cables or pizzas because people need them RIGHT NOW is not the same. I do see scenarios where drones make sense but…

Oh fill the sky with drones, no worries there.

If they start crashing on my head during a picnic, I would be a little annoyed...

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