Lets assume this technology took off! With thousands of drones flying in the sky , the urban sky will look so ugly. Do we really need to use drone for parcel delivery ?
Amazon Prime Air
221–230 of 604 posts
Re: Amazon Prime Air
#222Imagine the Amazon mothership flying above your city with hundreds of drones doing the deliveries.
Re: Amazon Prime Air
#223there was a conspicuous display of human labor at the beginning
Re: Amazon Prime Air
#224I wonder whether this might necessitate the creation of a kind of "landing pad" with bluetooth LE beacons to signal to the approaching drone where to deliver the goods, that and/or a Santa's Chimney-like chute (I'm thinking apartment complexes) that can obviate the need for the drone to "land" at human level.
One also marvels at the possibility for home-to-home delivery, say, for used items, or the ability to have returned items "picked-up" by these drones. A fascinating avenue.
Re: Amazon Prime Air
#225(Disclaimer: I work for Amazon, but not for anything related to this. This is the first time I'm learning of Prime Air.) I'm somewhat disheartened by the skepticism of a lot of comments from HN, Reddit, and Twitter. Not stuff like "I wonder how they'll handle adverse weather" (which I think is intellectually interesting) but stuff like "As soon as one of these kills a dog it's done for". What merit is there in rootin…
No kidding. I was -- and still am -- blown away when I saw this. I'm definitely rooting for its success.
And it's not as if the current carrier methods have zero risk. Who's to say this won't eliminate most/all of those risks, potentially at the expense of adding less new risks?
Re: Amazon Prime Air
#226I think that a lot of comments here are missing a crucial point: in the next few years unmanned vehicles are going to play a major role in most of the transportation landscape, whereas this is for people or objects. Amazon here is trying to play the same role that Google has been playing for a long time with their self driving cars. They are setting a standard and pushing for regulations and laws. It is not that diff…
I disagree that they're making the same play as Google. Google has never claimed they're going to make a self-driving car, or offer it as a service. As far as I can tell with a few minutes of googling, they don't even have a home page for the project. It's a research project and a tool to "push" the law in the direction Google wants. Amazon, on the other hand, is 100% offering a product. It has a name, and they indic…
I don't think we disagree on that. I'm not talking about the product side of things. I said and mean that Amazon is pushing for standards, regulations, laws etc. also by showing the possible demand side.
The reason why Google doesn't have a product, can be for multiple reasons, for example because they may (who knows) only want to create an Android OS-like self driving system, not necessarily building the cars. It's the same they did with smart phones.
If they want to dominate the car OS market, they might not need to present it as a product at this stage.
They just need, as Amazon, to push it enough to gain momentum and be one of the early players.
Re: Amazon Prime Air
#227Will there be pirate drones that fly around looting the Amazon drones?
Yes, just like there are pirate cars that drive around looting UPS trucks.
Re: Amazon Prime Air
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, you know, Bezos is a pretty smart guy. So maybe he knows something about this technology that the rest of us don't. Maybe he has an upper hand over the current state-of-the-art.
Yeah, right. The privileged information available only to the mega-rich...pfft.
The privileged information available only to the mega-rich...pfft.
Don't dismiss the value of insider information re: government policy.
Re: Amazon Prime Air
#229http://www.amazon.com/primeair When will I be able to choose Prime Air as a delivery option? A: We hope the FAA's rules will be in place as early as sometime in 2015. We will be ready at that time. Sorry, but not a chance. I'm intimately familiar with the flight controller, motor and batter technology behind multi-rotors, and I can state unequivocally that this is just not ready for 'prime'-time (so-to-speak :) There…
Battery recharge time - out for 15 mins flight? Recharge for 2 hours. Short trips to/from a fixed distribution point is the canonical use case for battery swapping in electric vehicles.
In a city, it would be awesome to see automated rooftop drone charging systems (solar powered of course).
Re: Amazon Prime Air
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Noise would be an issue with gas powered drones.
Cars aren't that noisy, and drones are going to be high up in any case.
Cars don't have eight rotor blades slapping the air, and we've gotten pretty good at enclosing all the loud bits (on expensive cars). Noise would certainly be a problem for gas-powered drones.