61–70 of 132 posts
It's an ethernet cable, looks like? That's pretty cool that a drone has enough power to break an ethernet cable. It just got tangled in a single cable, looks like it was run across someone's back yard. That's not a bad failure mode, imo - gives them a little exercise in problem solving, figuring out how to prevent ethernet/cable collisions and snags, and maybe results in sensor upgrades, or they figure out good detan…
It would be great that the drone had some kind of tactile sensibility. Go slowly in the opposite direction of said contact first, then if that is not working try to rotate on one of the horizontal axis while going in the opposite direction to see if it make a difference, and if it doesn't then something is stuck on your skin, and you should be able to notice that your weight is not the same as before; if that's not t…
Looking at the video, the cable looks ... fragile. Would a large bird landing on it do the same amount of damage? Shouldn't it be thick, armoured cable, attached to a strong wire or something?
Shouldn't drones run by trillion-dollar companies not crash into stuff?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consider that drones substitute for cars and trucks driving through neighborhoods. For the same payload delivered, ground vehicles cause significantly more property damage, environmental damage, and injuries/deaths.
That truck carries 500 packages. That drone one or two at best so to replace one truck you're looking at 100's of flights + return flights. And I'm not convinced the risks are lower.
I used to work in perception for autonomous aerial vehicles and horizontal wires were the hardest common object to avoid. Traditional stereo won't help you localize them -- wires are thin so even mere detection can be hard, and one portion of a wire looks much like another so feature matching fails resulting in bad or no depth estimates -- and LIDAR sacrifices resolution for weight and power consumption (which both h…
Cables don't move often. Why not simply have a map of all of them? Google sell maps of things like this from street view data.
There are also public and proprietary "aviation obstacle" databases across the world.
I used to work in perception for autonomous aerial vehicles and horizontal wires were the hardest common object to avoid. Traditional stereo won't help you localize them -- wires are thin so even mere detection can be hard, and one portion of a wire looks much like another so feature matching fails resulting in bad or no depth estimates -- and LIDAR sacrifices resolution for weight and power consumption (which both h…
I wonder if a more mechanical solution wouldn't help:
Whiskers, like on a cat. A long enough set of thin lightweight whiskers could touch the wire before the propellers do, giving time for the drone to stop and change course. Essentially, giving the drone a sense of touch.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably half my immediate neighbors get an amazon delivery a day. The truck makes sometimes two or three stops throughout the day and is there for like 15-20 minutes running packages. The thought of that replaced with drone traffic is crazy. It would be like dozens of landings and overflights per hour. It is already bad enough when the realtors fly their drones overhead. I can't imagine the birds and bees aren't get…
What on earth are people buying that's delivered so frequently? I find the whole concept of frequent deliveries confusing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's almost as if .. if noise, property damage, enviro damage, injury and death.. are the problems, then we should regulate everything that do those things equally rather than trying to pick winners among various transport modes. But among other things, this would mean holding people responsible for the incredible damage anyone can do with a car and the people will not stand for being told they cannot go vroom vroom.…
"I don't want a noisy neighborhood, but I want to drive my two-ton death trap that you can't see toddlers in front of and I also don't want to see any of my neighbors and also I want any object in the world deliverable within 24 hours."
I live in a noisy neighborhood with commercial truck thru traffic.
I don't have any particular love for the noise or the trucks, but the kind of people who complain about noise and machines will mostly don't select to live here which is good because I find those people to be bad generally.
[flagged]
There. Now you have a whole bunch of free drone parts.
I used to work in perception for autonomous aerial vehicles and horizontal wires were the hardest common object to avoid. Traditional stereo won't help you localize them -- wires are thin so even mere detection can be hard, and one portion of a wire looks much like another so feature matching fails resulting in bad or no depth estimates -- and LIDAR sacrifices resolution for weight and power consumption (which both h…
> Traditional stereo won't help you localize them [...] and LIDAR sacrifices resolution for weight and power consumption I wonder if a more mechanical solution wouldn't help: Whiskers, like on a cat. A long enough set of thin lightweight whiskers could touch the wire before the propellers do, giving time for the drone to stop and change course. Essentially, giving the drone a sense of touch.