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Amazon Prime Air

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Re: Amazon Prime Air

#441

Post by chongli »

Plasmoid wrote: post #371
snogglethorpe wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, if this idea proves viable, there are going to be (or at least there will be demand for) many orders of magnitude more of these than there are traditional types of air vehicles... And because of the very short range, much of that will probably be in dense urban areas (so it won't be anything like evenly distributed). So... I dunno if traditional approaches to avoiding airspace contention will work so we…

Perhaps, but would the air traffic be any worse than road traffic? Say you had 5 flight levels each direction, so 10 'levels' in all. Would we have more than an order of magnitude more flight traffic than road traffic? I would argue no.

Would we have more than an order of magnitude more flight traffic than road traffic? I would argue no.

We might. This sort of disruptive innovation could be staggering in scope. I could imagine putting in an order for a weekly grocery bill and having dozens of drones deliver the items from all over the place. Currently, we have an infrastructure that assumes we'll ship myriad items to a centralized clearing house (hub topology). It'd actually be far more efficient to eliminate this redundant, single point of failure and build something more akin to a mesh network. Items such as locally grown produce may even be shipped directly from farm to doorstep.

Re: Amazon Prime Air

#442

Post by lowglow »

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…

Amazon Prime Air was predicted months ago by Zac Morris: http://www.techendo.co/posts/amazon-air-predicted-by-zac-mor...

Re: Amazon Prime Air

#443

Post by mutagen »

sb057 wrote: post #241
jader201 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What are you talking about? This delivery method is completely absurd. I mean, who's "bright idea" was it put an entire neighborhood's packages together in a brown truck, then have it travel down roads at 60 miles per hour, often times striking other cars and killing people? And I don't know about you, but I was taught to never put all your eggs in one basket. I mean, there is literally nothing good that can come abo…

And then they leave it at my doorstep, sometimes even skipping the doorbell, where my neighbors and members of the public can steal the package at will. It's insane!

Re: Amazon Prime Air

#444

Post by Flenser »

ngoldbaum wrote: post #36

Vernor Vinge described a similar rocket-based delivery system in his short story "Fast Times at Fairmont High", which eventually became the novel Rainbows End. Crazy to see this actually happening in the real world.

That was the first thing that came to my mind. It would be interesting to know if that was what inspired amazon or if there was some earlier source that inspired both.

Edit:

Fast Times at Fairmont High was a reworking of an earlier short story Synthetic Serendipity, which is available online:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/synthetic-serend...

> "But don't worry about us." Fred looked upward, somehow prayerful and smug at the same time. "'FedEx will provide, and just in time.'"

> "Jerry was looking upward, at the FedEx shipment falling toward his outstretched hands."

Vinge also has them doing things other than delivery:

> maintenance UAVs flitted like bats around the canyons, popping out nodes here and there.

Re: Amazon Prime Air

#445

Post by blackdogie »

I really don't see this coming before self drivinng cars/van will just drive to your location and open up a hatch for you to collect your goods. Drones are only good for short ranges, light products and not to dense populated locations. Auto driving cars ars would be a hell of a lot more flexible.

Re: Amazon Prime Air

#447

Post by nathan_f77 »

scoot wrote: post #124

http://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…

Sounds like a lot of fun problems to solve, and I'm sure they have many competent engineers working on it.

Re: Amazon Prime Air

#448

Post by InclinedPlane »

One point I'd like to make on this:

There's the obvious question, why bring up the subject now when they don't even have the technology ready? The answer is easily revealed by the response: to get over the giggle factor as early as possible. Right now much of the commentary is about how ridiculous or silly this is, but that will fade with exposure and with publicity of successes in testing.

There are lots of things that have the same problem. Legalized marijuana, space tourism, reusable launch vehicles, manned mars missions, 3D printed organs, etc. Often times it's as important to get over the giggle factor as it is to build something that works. Personal computers and tablet computers ran into the same problem, but once people stopped thinking of them as toys people got down to the business of making practical use of them.

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