Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Whatever happened to the “coming wave” of delivery drones?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 228 posts

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to the “coming wave” of delivery drones?

#61

Post by mNovak »

dheera wrote: post #38

> Food delivery companies as well seemed to be testing out robots that would bring your food to you albeit in a more sidewalk bound way Former delivery robot startup cofounder (Robby Technologies) here. To be honest hardware was by far the most time-consuming thing. I wanted to spend 80%+ of our engineering time and funds on software but it turned out that we ended up spending 80%+ of the time dealing with electromec…

Thanks for sharing your story honestly. These are things I wish investors understood -- building good HW is just not as sexy as computer vision on the pitch deck

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to the “coming wave” of delivery drones?

#62

Post by gabrielsroka »

jeffalyanak wrote: post #57
TillE wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much like Theranos, basic immutable laws of nature make the whole idea absurd. Namely, that it requires a ton of energy to keep an object aloft. It's just wildly inefficient, and will never see serious usage outside of tiny niches. Not until we get science fiction antigravity or tiny fusion reactors or something.

Ironically one of the areas it _is_ being used successfully is in delivery of blood to some areas in Rwanda, but they're using fixed-wing drones and are even doing slingshot launches. [1] The economics are totally different, though. The "product" is very high value and has a short shelf life, so being able to deliver it quickly is a big benefit. On top of that, using a fixed-wing delivery vehicle and launching it wit…

From the same channel https://youtu.be/J-M98KLgaUU

See also https://youtu.be/DOWDNBu9DkU From 3 months ago

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to the “coming wave” of delivery drones?

#64

Post by orangepurple »

I posit two major reasons.

1. Command and control - Human in the loop is still a necessity because common delivery environments are too complex for an algorithm to navigate successfully so far.

2. Energy - it takes too long to recharge a drone battery pack. Flying is very energy intensive and there just isn't a way to refuel fast enough from the hub for this to make sense yet. The tested, working alternative is to use a two stroke engine but the pollution per mile from those is astronomical.

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to the “coming wave” of delivery drones?

#67

Post by dralley »

er4hn wrote: post #49

Zeyi Yang from China Report at MIT Tech Review had a story on how well it's going in China: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/23/1073500/drone-fo... . The BLUF is it still requires a fair amount of human labor and it works way better when it can go to a designated pickup point. His teaser for the article also had a more detailed story about how he kept on getting human drivers delivering him milk teas when he…

>The BLUF is it still requires a fair amount of human labor and it works way better when it can go to a designated pickup point.

If you need a designated pickup point, it would seem like the already-existing Amazon pickup box system would be a better choice.

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to the “coming wave” of delivery drones?

#68

Post by ghaff »

nmstoker wrote: post #9

Great question. I'm not aware of any concrete reasons, but I suppose issues relating to these sorts of points: - despite the sky being generally less constrained than ground delivery there are challenging obstructions, which are potentially far more risky than for ground travel: nudge past many ground obstructions you'd be okay, do the same in the sky, your drone is toast - liability is far greater in the sky if your…

For small items, I sometimes get it delivered by an Amazon truck but a lot of the time it just comes from my USPS driver who is putting (mostly junk mail) in my inbox anyway.

Anything I get frozen gets sent in a relatively big box with dry ice or ice packs.

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to the “coming wave” of delivery drones?

#69

Post by mortenjorck »

I interviewed a few months ago with one of the leaders in the space, and when I asked the HM my standard “what do you see as the biggest challenge facing the business right now” I got a surprising answer: “the weather.”

My sense is that drone delivery has the same weather dependency as self-driving cars, only greatly magnified.

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to the “coming wave” of delivery drones?

#70

Post by ghaff »

Greenpants wrote: post #7

There's a lot of research done with drones but the world isn't quite ready yet. Realistically, drones delivering packages will get shot down in the US, simply for being unmanned and flying over people's neighbourhoods. People easily feel threatened. Perhaps more importantly, there's too much that could go wrong. What about legislation where they may fly and how high? What if a drone crashes into someone or something?…

Honestly, I don't expect a lot of skeet practice in general. But you need to beat the cost of USPS and Amazon delivery trucks which seem pretty efficient and--if not zero liability--at least liability that's been well established over a good hundred years. It's theoretically cool but once you get out of medical deliveries to remote areas it's not clear how practical it is.
Post reply on HN