101–110 of 136 posts
I pick up most of my packages at the local post office because I live in an apartment, it's a 5 minute walk away, not really an inconvenience.
There's a fatal flaw. Even if commercial delivery drones could be engineered to not crash into people or houses, not tangle with power lines, not cause accidents on highways, and not collide with each other once they are common, there's one thing that will instantly get them banned. That will be the time someone uses a UAV to deliver 10 Oz of Semtex and a proximity sensor to someone they don't like. Exactly how are y…
I don't see what problem delivering packages with drones would be solving, package delivery seems already quite efficient to me. Also I suppose drones would often be able to deliver just one package at a time because of weight restrictions. I pick up most of my packages at the local post office because I live in an apartment, it's a 5 minute walk away, not really an inconvenience.
It's raining and you need an umbrella, with nomsalesperson near? Order a drone. Forgot to buy mayo back in the store? Order throug drone and get it in an hour.
But there once you're able to order stuff and get it within minutes, not hours or days, there are other effects that start happening. For one, you don't need to stockpile supplies anymore, or you can do things more spontaneusly. Will 40 or 100'people come to a party. Who cares, if there are not enough forks or plates, you can order them fast. Or, if you want to play in garage, you don't have to make sure that you've got all the supplies well in advance, or go to the store and back 20'times.
Think how many businesses were spawned, and how much more efficient are people now that there are mobile phones, not just stationary. But ic an imagine people saying "who needs mobile, I can call when i get back home, and i've got an answering machine if someone calls when i'm away.
I don't see what problem delivering packages with drones would be solving, package delivery seems already quite efficient to me. Also I suppose drones would often be able to deliver just one package at a time because of weight restrictions. I pick up most of my packages at the local post office because I live in an apartment, it's a 5 minute walk away, not really an inconvenience.
I don't see what problem delivering packages with drones would be solving, package delivery seems already quite efficient to me. Also I suppose drones would often be able to deliver just one package at a time because of weight restrictions. I pick up most of my packages at the local post office because I live in an apartment, it's a 5 minute walk away, not really an inconvenience.
however last mile delivery? to the customer? sorry, too many liabilities plus the risk of some agency / group finding them the perfect way to deliver unwanted items to people.
If FAA would have allowed commercial drone operations without further regulation, and the technology would have had widespread adoption, there would be great risks involved.
Before there are the equivalents of traffic lights, air traffic control and airways and regulations to how much and what you can carry, there are risks involved. ("hello Amazon, I'd like to have 5 kilograms worth of lithium batteries, drone delivery to this busy urban address." what could possibly go wrong?)
Of course, things can be relatively safe if common sense is applied, but you can't expect commercial operators to apply common sense when there are potential profits available.
And common sense is not always correct either, back in the 1930s when the state of the art in aviation was relatively comparable to the state of the art in drones today, most people thought that pilots should fly by the seat of their pants and flight instruments are only supplemental (which is deadly wrong, and today all planes have doubly redundant gyroscopic instruments).
The reality is that the technology to fly unmanned and autonomous drones exists but it's not mature enough to work in large scale commercial operations safely and effectively.
I don't see what problem delivering packages with drones would be solving, package delivery seems already quite efficient to me. Also I suppose drones would often be able to deliver just one package at a time because of weight restrictions. I pick up most of my packages at the local post office because I live in an apartment, it's a 5 minute walk away, not really an inconvenience.
It's like saying "why use phone when telegraph is good enough". If you can order things and receive them very fast in any place, there are things that you can start ordering that otherwise you wouldn't do. It's raining and you need an umbrella, with nomsalesperson near? Order a drone. Forgot to buy mayo back in the store? Order throug drone and get it in an hour. But there once you're able to order stuff and get it w…
I know I'm sounding condescending, but that's not why I'm replying to this topic, this is just one of those things that right now to me seem like the wrong direction to look at when solving peoples problems, a dead end so to speak.
The whole smartphone/tablet thing is a sore point for me as well, I love the hardware but I don't like the mobile OS movement at all, I hate that there is no real push to go in the direction of something like Ubuntu for Android[1] as the devices are getting more capable.
I don't see what problem delivering packages with drones would be solving, package delivery seems already quite efficient to me. Also I suppose drones would often be able to deliver just one package at a time because of weight restrictions. I pick up most of my packages at the local post office because I live in an apartment, it's a 5 minute walk away, not really an inconvenience.
Well, if it's not an inconvenience to YOU, then clearly the idea should be scrapped.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't see something as potentially risky as drones running around unregulated. Really? How about people hitting baseballs with bats unregulated? That's a heck of a lot more dangerous than most hobbyist drones, perhaps unless you're deliberately trying to do harm (in which case regulations don't matter).
It's risk assessment time. How many people are hitting baseball bats with unregulated bats today versus the number of drones that will be flying around cities delivering things all the time (and bumping into people on the sidewalks)? It takes little imagination to see that once drones are accepted as an efficient method of transportation, then companies will want to use them as much as possible, thus possibly creatin…
Meanwhile, in Russia a pizzeria recently launched unmanned delivery: http://rt.com/news/167936-russia-drones-pizza-delivery/