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Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

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

#71

Post by TrevorJ »

mc32 wrote: post #59
newjersey wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To further elaborate your point, I think it is also about reducing friction. People will probably still go grocery shopping but if you were fairly confident that something you are not sure if you need is available both at Wally's world and at Amazon.com for about the same price, would you rather buy it anyways during your grocery run or put it off until you know you will need it? I don't want to think whether I will…

This will sound a bit off kilter, but except for truly emergent situations (injury, medication, etc.) it's good to have some "friction" otherwise we could end up with a population demanding immediate satisfaction and perfection from everything, whereas many things will remain imperfect and unrealized. Why can't my government change right now the way I want it! Why are they serving someone else in need and not me! I h…

That ship sailed with plumbing and the electric grid.

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

#72

Post by Retric »

8ig8 wrote: post #64
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…

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.

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

#73

Post by blackjack48 »

A couple days ago, I needed a new cordless landline phone and wanted to try out Prime Now. It was impressive that I could track my courier's location and have it arrive within half an hour - only problem was that it was the wrong model. I've ordered hundreds of things from Amazon and can't recall ever receiving an incorrect item. To make matters worse, the CS rep I spoke to said they couldn't send couriers to do returns or exchanges: I had to UPS it 2,000 miles to Kentucky. Winning the ecommerce delivery race won't mean anything unless Amazon can maintain its high accuracy rate and positive user experience.

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

#74

Post by Retric »

alooPotato wrote: post #65

I'm really curious how this beats a amazon owned delivery truck? Serious question. Economically and at scale, it seems like both the truck and drone are actually pretty cheap. Speed of delivery and at scale, the only way the drone is faster is if there is a warehouse in each city and your item is stocked. Otherwise, the bottleneck in delivery time is the long distance shipping. Feasibility and at scale, the truck see…

Often going 5 miles in a city can take 30+ minutes. So using drones makes this easier. Further per package delivery costs are probably lower. At day 10,000$ per drone, an average deliver 8 packages a day, for 3 years. That's 1.25$ per package.

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

#75

Post by methehack »

alooPotato wrote: post #65

I'm really curious how this beats a amazon owned delivery truck? Serious question. Economically and at scale, it seems like both the truck and drone are actually pretty cheap. Speed of delivery and at scale, the only way the drone is faster is if there is a warehouse in each city and your item is stocked. Otherwise, the bottleneck in delivery time is the long distance shipping. Feasibility and at scale, the truck see…

I don't think this will be everywhere, just urban -- at least a t first. My guess is they'll also use PrimeNow (1, 2, 4 hour delivery by car/truck from a localized warehouse -- happening NOW in my city) as a canary in a coal mine to test a given market's suitability to immediate delivery (in terms of demand, regulatory env, probably tons of other factors).

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

#76

Post by bigiain »

DasIch wrote: post #68
bigiain wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how many of those 2 million people have an appropriate size space for this video's "landing zone in the back garden"? Where I live is probably high enough density to make this idea work, but there's not enough landing space I think: https://www.google.com.au/maps/@-33.9038146,151.1761515,327m...

The drone could hover over the sidewalk in front of a building, you could signal it with your smartphone similar to how the sign is used in the first video. The drone could then drop the package or it could have a mechanism that allows you to pull the package from the drone while it's in the air above you.

Heh - have you ever been close to a quadcopter capable of carrying a 2lb payload for 20+ minutes?

It's pretty much 4 carbon fibre lawnmower blades thrashing around in the air. I'm not getting anywhere near close enough to remove a payload from one while it's attempting to keep a stationary hover in an area of poor gps reception.

I'm reasonably careless with my little quads (~350g with 5 inch plastic props spun by 220W motors), but my medium sized one (~800g) gets treated with much more respect. I've got a friend with a 5+kg Octocopter - it's got 2+kW motors spinning 18 inch carbon fibre blades, I don't get within 4 or 5 meters of that when it's powered up and armed (and I'm extremely wary of it when it's got power connected but isn't "armed", because that's really just trusting Chinese electronics and open source software to not chop my fingers off...)

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

#77

Post by nine_k »

8ig8 wrote: post #64
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…

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

Not just hooliganism: there is real booty to collect.

I suppose the flying altitude should be outside te air gun range, with descent right naivete landing spot.

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

#78

Post by DasIch »

bigiain wrote: post #76
DasIch wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The drone could hover over the sidewalk in front of a building, you could signal it with your smartphone similar to how the sign is used in the first video. The drone could then drop the package or it could have a mechanism that allows you to pull the package from the drone while it's in the air above you.

Heh - have you ever been close to a quadcopter capable of carrying a 2lb payload for 20+ minutes? It's pretty much 4 carbon fibre lawnmower blades thrashing around in the air. I'm not getting anywhere near close enough to remove a payload from one while it's attempting to keep a stationary hover in an area of poor gps reception. I'm reasonably careless with my little quads (~350g with 5 inch plastic props spun by 220…

I admittedly haven't been that close to one but we do trust or are seriously considering trusting software to control heavy machinery like cars. Is is truly so out of the question that we might be able to make them safe enough for that?

It might require more advanced designs, far better tested and well regulated software but being able to get that close to a drone would enable a lot more use cases for them. I think many people are going to invest quite a lot of money into making this possible, so I think we're going to see something like this eventually, even if it takes decades.

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

#79

Post by Perixoog »

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…

Except there will be no driver.
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