71–80 of 132 posts
Video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/089CBuGTkcY (it's also in the article; my ad blocker must have gotten me on this one). Amazon are not having a good run with these lately. The double crane cable incident ( https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/02/us/arizona-amazon-drones-cras... ) and the LIDAR failsafe issue ( https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-16/amazon-re... ) were both rather surprising from a process and…
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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.
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A 10m berth from wires would exclude a substantial proportion of houses in my city.
Then they shouldn’t be flying in your city. As is apparently becoming obvious.
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.
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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.
A truck travels a greater distance to deliver those 500 packages to the same locations, as it must take roads instead of flying in a straight line. And roads are much more likely to have people on them than a random patch of ground. Also the truck weighs several tons. The weight requires more energy to move stuff around, and has more kinetic energy than an 80lb drone.
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…
This makes a lot of sense. I wonder if it wouldn't be better for autonomous vision to use three cameras instead of two for better spatial reasoning.. maybe in a triangle pattern?
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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?
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.
I hadn't thought about this in a long time. Looks like her lab is still going strong doing research at the intersection of biology and robotics on whisker-based sensing:
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> 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.
Thin lightweight whiskers are going to be challenging to manage on a propeller-driven vehicle. They'll get blown all over the place. Having them extend out past the propellers will likely get them tangled in the propellers.
But that's fine, isn't it? If they're intended to detect fixed objects, then noticing that one or more of them have ceased to be blown around in that way may be a good way to detect unanticipated contact with a fixed object: When the signal becomes less noisy, then maybe something is in the way.
And the whiskers don't have to be all floppy like a wet noodle. I myself am thinking that something rigid or semi-rigid might be good. Perhaps something akin to armature wire, or thin spring steel. Maybe even literal bamboo chopsticks.
They can also be constrained so that they don't get sent into the props.
My little brain thinks that the drone-end of the whiskers can be attached to potentiometers, with light return springs to bring them back towards center, like the mechanism used by an analog stick on a PS3 controller.