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Amazon Prime Air

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Re: Amazon Prime Air

#311

Post by pcurve »

datacog wrote: post #253

Pretty neat concept. But if the goal is to deliver within 30 minutes, I wonder why does amazon need a drone? Domino's certainly dint need a drone to deliver pizza's. Given the cost of research and manufacturing of the drone, I bet this would be just a fancy R&D project. Plus dont forget the lack of accuracy the drone would have, there has to be a manual interception thus questioning the original concept itself. Musk…

Once they have tens of thousands of these operating, i'd imagine per unit cost will fall below $2000 within few years, even accounting for R&D. If it can deliver 10 packages per day (accounting for charge time), that's 3600 deliveries per year. Even if you have to replace it after 1 year, it's 50-60 cents per delivery.

This will be perfect for suburbs nearby metropolitan regions.

Re: Amazon Prime Air

#312

Post by Turing_Machine »

DufusM wrote: post #254
kyro wrote: post #152

This concept and forward thinking is of the type I make a conscious effort to protect from skepticism and naysayers. Aside from any obvious or glaring safety issues, ideas like this one, that teeter on the reality-joke line, are the exact ones that bring about true disruption. And that's why I encourage everyone around me to keep an open and forgiving mind, like you would with a child. Will Amazon Prime Air work? I d…

I hope it works too - it seems so cool. But I am not sure this is the big problem in this space. Current delivery time = 1 day for last mile + >1 day for warehouse -> local area This method reduces the last mile delivery time down to 30 mins but it is not clear how the second part would be optimized down. At least, without losing the value proposition of Amazon - giant centralized warehouses instead of local retail o…

It's like the levels of caching in a computer.

(just using orders of magnitude for an example, the actual numbers for best efficiency probably aren't quite so nice)

The 1000 most frequently ordered items in a warehouse near your neighborhood. The 10000 most frequently ordered items in a city-wide warehouse. The 100,000 most frequently ordered items in a regional warehouse.

Amazon already has the regional warehouse part.

I'd guess that this might be worth doing even if only the 1,000 most frequently ordered items can get there in 30 minutes, and should definitely be worth doing if you can get the 10,000 most frequently ordered items there in 30 minutes.

Re: Amazon Prime Air

#313

Post by glord »

haha awesome, sweet video and a great project. Its kind of like the refugee camp pill delivery quad we prototyped at MHacks. 2 big questions: 1) how do they handle motor failure, drones falling out of the sky? 2)How do they auto land? Its too soon for some sort of real time obstacle avoidance / image processing / auto landing without heavy lidar, and a lot of compute. What about range? These drones only fly for max 20 minutes at 20mph so you'd have to live within 3 ish miles.

Re: Amazon Prime Air

#314

Post by rayhano »

dakrisht wrote: post #130

This is an awesome idea of course. It's a glimpse into the future. I remember tweeting with Chris Anderson of 3D Robotics about a year ago about autonomous package delivery from A > B. I'm sure Bezos and team started nerding out on this concept years ago. Eventually, "vehicles" the size of UPS trucks will be delivering packages autonomously all over the world. This is definitely a glimpse into that day. And it won't…

I don't know about the US, but in the UK there are 'sky lanes' that helicopter pilots must follow.

And in all honesty, this would benefit Amazon, because then they don't require drone pilots. Just programme the 'lanes', rudimentary GPS and proximity sensors and keep the speed down so that collision-avoidance can be activated with sufficient time.

Re: Amazon Prime Air

#315

Post by chongli »

throwaway092834 wrote: post #238
jmduke wrote: post #176

(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…

Human-driven delivery trucks hit and kill dogs, cats, men, women and children every day. On average, 16 people will die in any given day in a truck related crash. One in eight traffic fatalities involves a large cargo truck. Driving vehicles on roads is incredibly dangerous. I don't think it's possible for drones to do a worse job.

Human-driven delivery trucks hit and kill dogs, cats, men, women and children every day

And gasoline-powered vehicles of all sorts catch on fire all the time in collisions, yet one or two of Tesla's catch on fire and all hell breaks loose. Our mass media has an extremely regressive, anti-intellectual, pro-status quo bent.

Re: Amazon Prime Air

#316

Post by EricDeb »

esusatyo wrote: post #233
jmduke wrote: post #176

(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…

Hacker News on Dropbox: Why would anyone want this? I can do this already with my home PC, all I need to do is install package xyz and let it run in the background. How does this handle duplicates, this is doomed to fail.

The comment he's referring to is one of my all-time favorites.

Re: Amazon Prime Air

#317

Post by visakanv »

hnriot wrote: post #301
esusatyo wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News on Dropbox: Why would anyone want this? I can do this already with my home PC, all I need to do is install package xyz and let it run in the background. How does this handle duplicates, this is doomed to fail.

Dropbox is for people that can't use rsync+git. For the unix-competent, it's not particularly difficult and we managed for many years with the previous tools, rsync+svn or even rsync+cvs

so basically everyone except a small niche group

Re: Amazon Prime Air

#318

Post by 8bitpony »

hnriot wrote: post #301
esusatyo wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News on Dropbox: Why would anyone want this? I can do this already with my home PC, all I need to do is install package xyz and let it run in the background. How does this handle duplicates, this is doomed to fail.

Dropbox is for people that can't use rsync+git. For the unix-competent, it's not particularly difficult and we managed for many years with the previous tools, rsync+svn or even rsync+cvs

Guess what? There are millions of people that can't use rsync + git.

Re: Amazon Prime Air

#319

Post by jasonwocky »

chongli wrote: post #315
throwaway092834 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human-driven delivery trucks hit and kill dogs, cats, men, women and children every day. On average, 16 people will die in any given day in a truck related crash. One in eight traffic fatalities involves a large cargo truck. Driving vehicles on roads is incredibly dangerous. I don't think it's possible for drones to do a worse job.

Human-driven delivery trucks hit and kill dogs, cats, men, women and children every day And gasoline-powered vehicles of all sorts catch on fire all the time in collisions, yet one or two of Tesla's catch on fire and all hell breaks loose. Our mass media has an extremely regressive, anti-intellectual, pro- status quo bent.

Status quo bias is a condition of humanity, not just the media.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_quo_bias

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