131–140 of 228 posts
I live in a Durham, NC and there is a small radius where a company called Flytrex does drone food delivery. We use it every couple weeks since they have almost no fees unlike Uber Eats. From what I understand they place the order, drive a car to pick up your food, drive back to the launch pad, then load and send the drone. It then drops the food using a long cable that leaves behind a reusable bag in your front lawn.…
Wing (Google) and a few others have it open to the public in suburbs in South East Queensland Australia atm. Have ordered a drink through door dash to try it out before and it seems to work pretty well. It wouldn't surprise me if the kinks are being ironed out here before opening it up in bigger markets. There were a fair few complaints about the noise for the logan ones when they first came out but apparently they a…
Its logan, so you know, kids on dirtbikes, dogs, road noise, fireworks, loud music etc I barely notice the drones.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A truck will burn a lot less fuel per kg of cargo. That's because it is carrying many packages at once and fuel consumption is split across all packages. A drone only carries one package. So in reality a truck is a way more efficient way of delivering good.
Seems like the best compromise is something like the "drone spitter" delivery trucks from Ready Player One . The truck wouldn't need to slow down (let alone stop), multiple drones would give high utilization, and you could further optimize delivery routes by "crow flying" to houses that aren't even on the same street. https://www.inverse.com/article/43043-ready-player-one-drone... https://www.imcdb.org/v001094117.htm…
There are food delivery drones near me. Two recent data points: 1) They’re expanding the delivery territory. 2) They’re still using pilots with line of sight to make the delivery. I think that’s odd. Maybe someone is moving the goalposts, or maybe there’s not a clear roadmap to broad approval.
Are you kidding me? It was all basically vaporware that disappeared when the free money ended. The Kiwi food delivery robots were basically fake -- they only went about 1/8 of a mile automatically. So they'd drive a car to the end of a street with your food and a robot, and then get the robot out of the car, put the food inside, and then the robot would hobble over a couple hundred feet to your door. Absolutely usele…
Much like Theranos, basic immutable laws of nature make the whole idea absurd. Namely, that it requires a ton of energy to keep an object aloft. It's just wildly inefficient, and will never see serious usage outside of tiny niches. Not until we get science fiction antigravity or tiny fusion reactors or something.
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Long story short, It's the FAA's fault. Initially they said, "no, you can't do that" because there are no regulations for that. With pressure from companies, the FAA took years to create the rules to make drone deliveries legal. Finally there is some regulatory framework. Drones have to be specifically designed and manufactured to pass the FAA's certification program. We've all seen capable drones from Amazon's marke…
To be fair, this sounds like the FAA is doing its job. Tiny consumer drones are one thing, but if there are going to be fleets of drones carrying packages all over my city, I'll take a slow and thorough FAA over move fast and break things.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A truck will burn a lot less fuel per kg of cargo. That's because it is carrying many packages at once and fuel consumption is split across all packages. A drone only carries one package. So in reality a truck is a way more efficient way of delivering good.
Seems like the best compromise is something like the "drone spitter" delivery trucks from Ready Player One . The truck wouldn't need to slow down (let alone stop), multiple drones would give high utilization, and you could further optimize delivery routes by "crow flying" to houses that aren't even on the same street. https://www.inverse.com/article/43043-ready-player-one-drone... https://www.imcdb.org/v001094117.htm…
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…
4. Payloads on flying things have severe weight and volume limitations. This limits what you can deliver to things that are small and light.
5. An autonomous drone represents an opportunity for theft or interference. See the drone coming, then: steal the goods when it delivers, interfere with its GPS and force it into an error mode that lands the drone, etc. You don't even need to be at the destination.
6. Multicopters, the devices most people think of when they think drones, have terrible range and payload capacity. The flight mode is akin to helicopters, "beat the air into submission". On the upside, they can hover on the spot. In contrast, plane-style drones which fly aerodynamically or "on the wing", have more range (being more efficient), but have difficulty landing on specific spots and then returning back to base. There are solutions around this, but not 100% viable in all cases. VTOL planes exist for instance, but they're finicky. Parachutes as a delivery mechanism also exist, but not everything can be delivered by dropping a payload.
And much more...
Air delivery exists in places where these aren't concerns and where the cost benefit analysis skews the other way. Zipline [0] has been doing a great job delivering blood to remote areas in Rwanda for a while now. Their product, payload, delivery method, geographical location, regulatory environment, all align to make it worth it. Watch some youtube videos of their operation, it's pretty neat.