Ask HN: Whatever happened to the “coming wave” of delivery drones?

I feel like a few years ago all the rage was that Amazon and other retailers were going to deliver things via drones, straight to your doorstep

Food delivery companies as well seemed to be testing out robots that would bring your food to you albeit in a more sidewalk bound way

Its been a few years and I have yet to have a single thing drone delivered to my house

What happened to that alternate future? Are companies still working on it? Or did we move on from that idea for some reasons we discovered?

I was working with drones for a while and one issue with carrying weight was distance. If you want a drone capable of carrying weight it has to have a specific size to accommodate the heavy object as well as batteries that get heavier the longer you want to fly and the more power you need to transport said object. Outside of that rules about line of sight were a thing, so you couldn’t just let the drone fly a pre-programmed path but you also needed to see it. There is also a risk of being shot down. I think at the end of the day search and rescue or coast guards might use drones to deliver something very quickly if there is no other way but outside of that I see challenges that are rather hard to overcome.

I don't remember where, but I read a lengthy comment from someone in the industry which said there were two main things preventing delivery drones from being a viable market:

1. FAA regulations - delivery drones can't operate within X miles of an airport (technically they can, but it requires a much stricter degree of certification and compliance nobody wants to bother with)

2. Drones need a landing space, so people without yards (like apartment and townhouse dwellers, who make up a lot of the population in exactly the densely populated areas where you'd want to use drones to begin with) can't be served

And it turns out that once you exclude "houses within X miles of an airport" and "houses without an LZ", there aren't enough customers left to make delivery drones worth it.

There's a lot of research done with drones but the world isn't quite ready yet. Realistically, drones delivering packages will get shot down in the US, simply for being unmanned and flying over people's neighbourhoods. People easily feel threatened.

Perhaps more importantly, there's too much that could go wrong. What about legislation where they may fly and how high? What if a drone crashes into someone or something? What if someone's package gets stolen?

As much as the technology enthusiasts in us enjoy the concept of delivery drones, most of us humans still prefer a fellow human in the process of delivering packages to handle edge cases where things might go wrong.

Great question. I'm not aware of any concrete reasons, but I suppose issues relating to these sorts of points:

- despite the sky being generally less constrained than ground delivery there are challenging obstructions, which are potentially far more risky than for ground travel: nudge past many ground obstructions you'd be okay, do the same in the sky, your drone is toast

- liability is far greater in the sky if your drone carrying something comes down in an uncontrolled manner (on someone or something)

- obstructions are likely to be high at the very points people are willing to come meet the drone (antennas, overhead power lines, washing lines, nets, etc) and they're often hard to spot

- unattended drop off is harder for drones in the places where customers are most dense (ie cities) upping the complexity further

- potential regulatory issues (but I understand below certain heights it's generally not regulated in many countries)

- bad PR from noisy drones!

- risks from non customers interfering

- challenges with carrying what you're dropping off: if it's heavy you need bigger drones; if it's light you'd be tying up a drone with something small, unless you can figure how to drop off multiple items, or you have a mixture of drone sizes

They all seem like they could plausibly be solved but I'm no drone engineer!

Maybe it could get going with targeting particular items that are strongly appealing to customers and might narrow the complexities due to being more uniform than a random Amazon basket. I believe an early use in Bhutan was for medical deliveries. Maybe something premium like ice-cream or cocktails might appeal with the right marketing?!