Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

#131

Post by brandmeyer » Mon, Nov 30, 2015, 5:20 AM UTC

guroot wrote: post #117

zw123456 wrote: post #69

For a while I have thought that a cool way of doing this would be if the drones could fly close to high voltage power lines and use induction to power it and charge the battery. Then when it gets close to the destination it could peel away from the high tension lines and use battery for to cover the last mile. That way you could have the warehouse in some industrial area or whatever. They could make a deal with the p…

Wouldn't that pose problems for the navigation equipment?

Depends on how the IMU and GPS are designed. It could pose a problem for equipment that isn't purposed-designed to ignore that frequency. However, textbook solutions for that problem exist. 60 Hz is well outside the vehicle's closed-loop control bandwidth, so just ensuring that there isn't an aliasing problem with that (or the rectified 120 Hz) would be sufficient.

Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

#132

Post by shpx » Mon, Nov 30, 2015, 5:30 AM UTC

toyg wrote: post #99

jaxomlotus wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm betting that by the time this is real (and assuming the shown implementation is what actually goes live), everyone will have their own personal QR code so there will be no mistakes.

Take a pic of your neighbour's QR, print a copy, profit.

Wait 40 minutes, don't get package, email support, they review footage/delivery data, see drone going to your neighbor, press charges for petty theft.

Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

#133

Post by shpx » Mon, Nov 30, 2015, 5:32 AM UTC

Retric wrote: post #72

8ig8 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a one time hooliganish teenager, I wonder if these will become targets for slingshots (or more sophisticated surface-to-air weapons).

Hitting something small going 30MPH at 400 feet seems hard even with most guns. Adding some cameras you could probably track down who is attacking easily enough to discourage most people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGLxKXtkHpY

Drone is a smaller than amazon's but it's a good demonstration

Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

#134

Post by drbillnye » Mon, Nov 30, 2015, 5:39 AM UTC

mapt wrote: post #90

hooloovoo_zoo wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect this will be limited to urban areas, like all of Amazon's premium delivery options. 30 minutes of flight time at 30 mph means you could cover the entire city of Houston (the largest city by area in the U.S.) with about 4 warehouses. I think you're much better off trying to increase the range of your drones than using carriers because your coverage area is quadratic with your drones' range but linear with yo…

Drones have got to get back in addition to getting to the target, and you only get 30 minutes if most/all of your payload is dedicated to battery. The drone has a fairly short range while fully loaded, and a lot longer range while empty.

What we need is a sort of tcp/ip network for drones where they understand where charging stations are along the way, and other brands delivery drones would eventually be able to participate in the network as well which would spur growth. I'm good for a few charging / delivery stations in my neighborhood

Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

#135

Post by shpx » Mon, Nov 30, 2015, 5:41 AM UTC

legohead wrote: post #94

Can't wait to see and hear hundreds of drones in the sky.

Yea this was one of my first thoughts too, drones are incredibly loud, even if its just one every few minutes it'll be unbearable. There are ideas on how to make them less loud, like putting the props inside the drone, but I suspect it will be very difficult to make them completely silent without flying really high.

Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

#136

Post by mc32 » Mon, Nov 30, 2015, 5:42 AM UTC

function_seven wrote: post #116

mc32 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We want a delay between what we think we want and what we get from government, else we get majority rules democracy which is not far removed from mob-mentality government.

I think you're stretching a little to get from faster merchandise delivery to mob-rule government. Or, your objections would have been valid against the railroad and the telegraph as well (both of those reduced friction tremendously). I get the gist of what you're saying, but I don't agree that artificially limiting technological innovation, or improvements in efficiencies is beneficial at all.

I think railroads reduced times to human times (from weeks/months to hours/days --but it wasn't a snap of the finger kind of response.

The objection I have is more with the psychology rather than the physicality of it. It makes things more disposable. You lost a sneaker, we get it replaced in minutes. It's allowing people to gorge on consumerism. It also puts the local shops at a disadvantage. But, mostly, it removes the barrier to thinking about buying more. You don't have to think about waiting till tomorrow, or two days from now, or having to walk twenty minutes, or get out and take transit, or jump into a car to go satiate the impulse. No, all you need is your desire (and buying power) and it's fulfilled.

Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

#137

Post by inopinatus » Mon, Nov 30, 2015, 5:53 AM UTC

zootam wrote: post #107

toyg wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One word (well, acronym): DIY. Middle-class suburban dad is trying to fix the newly-bought house, but he's constantly running out of the right size of screws and/or stuff he didn't even know he needed. At the moment that scenario results in a a lot of trips to the hardware store, but cheap 60-minute deliveries would change it for the better. Neonatal supplies, cleaning supplies, you name it -- the sort of thing you r…

lol delivering a physical game

A 20GB game (which is far from unusual now) in 30 minutes = 89mbit/sec, which is eight times the US national average broadband speed.

Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

#138

Post by ChocoCrepe » Mon, Nov 30, 2015, 5:55 AM UTC

mapt wrote: post #22

Here's what I think is more likely: A small regional airport is taken over by Amazon. They build hangars and warehouses onsite. It's ramped up to land and fly a big turbine-powered mothership every five minutes. The warehouse dispatches packages to stacks of delivery drones like the one pictured in the video. The mothership loads the delivery drones in order. The motherships take off regularly, and then as the mother…

Or even better, Amazon could build housing around their warehouses and move their shoppers into them. No flying motherships. No drones. No UPS necessary. We could call them Amazon Prime Cities. 100 bucks a year, housing included.

Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

#139

Post by Poiesis » Mon, Nov 30, 2015, 5:55 AM UTC

mapt wrote: post #22

Here's what I think is more likely: A small regional airport is taken over by Amazon. They build hangars and warehouses onsite. It's ramped up to land and fly a big turbine-powered mothership every five minutes. The warehouse dispatches packages to stacks of delivery drones like the one pictured in the video. The mothership loads the delivery drones in order. The motherships take off regularly, and then as the mother…

Why would the driver need to stop?

Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

#140

Post by function_seven » Mon, Nov 30, 2015, 6:10 AM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #136

function_seven wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're stretching a little to get from faster merchandise delivery to mob-rule government. Or, your objections would have been valid against the railroad and the telegraph as well (both of those reduced friction tremendously). I get the gist of what you're saying, but I don't agree that artificially limiting technological innovation, or improvements in efficiencies is beneficial at all.

I think railroads reduced times to human times (from weeks/months to hours/days --but it wasn't a snap of the finger kind of response. The objection I have is more with the psychology rather than the physicality of it. It makes things more disposable. You lost a sneaker, we get it replaced in minutes. It's allowing people to gorge on consumerism. It also puts the local shops at a disadvantage. But, mostly, it removes…

Fair point. This just happened to me yesterday. I needed a 3.5mm to RCA cable to connect my TV to the receiver[1]. The one I had wasn't long enough, so I found one on Amazon and ordered it for the next day.

By the time it was delivered, I had already found my long-lost extension cable and didn't need it anymore.

Waste of money and—to your point—if I didn't have that option I probably would have searched a little more around the house before resorting to buying a new one.

Ultimately I still want to see these things advance, though. Whatever mechanism that would set lower bounds on delivery times would be worse than the problem it would be intended to prevent.

[1] Never mind why the TV only outputs audio on a 3.5mm jack, kinda cheap.