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Annoying drone buzzing when it works, 80lb bricks from heaven when it doesn't. Not really looking forward to that future.
Share price goes up, everyone’s happy. That’s the only metric which counts.
Amazon faces FAA probe after delivery drone snaps internet cable in Texas
91–100 of 132 posts
Re: Amazon faces FAA probe after delivery drone snaps internet cable in Texas
#92I 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…
It's very simple: don't fly there
there are very little aerial lines few meters highers and ones that exist can be probably spotted from satellite images and planned around.
Especially if delivery area is limited, they could just map them out of the routes.
Re: Amazon faces FAA probe after delivery drone snaps internet cable in Texas
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sure, they'll move around in the prop wash. 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 thi…
> 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.
I don't think you're right about this. The concept of the whiskers is to notice when you've collided with something. Real whiskers aren't rigid because colliding with something when you're rigid means snapping. (Ever stub your toe?)
Think of the rigidity of the whiskers as being traded off against your maximum movement speed.
Re: Amazon faces FAA probe after delivery drone snaps internet cable in Texas
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same. Even outside the holiday season, there are 5+ package truck deliveries/day on my little street (12 houses). That's UPS, FedEx, USPS, usually multiple Amazon (which always surprises me), plus a couple unmarked vans. Plus couriers in cars. Plus food delivery, at least 2 a night. Almost all the Amazon vans are now electric Rivians or GMCs. That's a LOT of drone traffic, given there's near zero ability to double up…
I recently started seeing electric delivery vans from IKEA in my city. One thing I really noticed: They are whisper quiet compared to diesel trucks.
Yeah, it makes a massive difference in the neighborhood, where speeds are so low (10mph or so) there isn't much tire noise.
Now if we could just get our landscape crew (HOA, not mine personally) to adopt electric leaf blowers. I hate this time of year and the constant roar of those things.
Re: Amazon faces FAA probe after delivery drone snaps internet cable in Texas
#95Looking 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?
It is a standard outdoor coaxial cable. Perhaps it looks thin because you are mentally scaling to the size of smaller hobby drones. Edit: The MK30 is 78 pounds, and about 6 feet diameter. Here is an image with a human for scale: https://dronexl.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Amazon-Prime-A...
The cable was described in the news as thin. It isn't that high off the ground and with or without the drone in view, it looks thin.
Maybe it's an RG6 drop, but it could also be ethernet or a fiber drop. They're all thin wires, though.
Re: Amazon faces FAA probe after delivery drone snaps internet cable in Texas
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, they'll move around in the prop wash. 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 thi…
> 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. I don't think you're right about this. The concept of the whiskers is to notice when you've collided with something. Real whiskers aren't rigid because colliding with something when you're rigid means snapping. (Ever stub your toe?) Think of the rigidity of the whiskers as being tra…
I don't think you read my entire comment, or perhaps you're very unfamiliar with the operation of a PS3's analog control.
(The whisker can be both rigid and also flexibly-attached. These are not mutually-exclusive constructs.)
Re: Amazon faces FAA probe after delivery drone snaps internet cable in Texas
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You should really consider how much energy it takes to levitate an 80lb drone while flying across town, compared to how much energy it takes to roll an 8000lb van across town (even ignoring the fact that the van might deliver 100 packages while making it's way across town).
You raise an interesting point about energy per delivery. In you example, which one is lower per package? I assume the electric truck.
Re: Amazon faces FAA probe after delivery drone snaps internet cable in Texas
#98I 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
Wouldn't making a quick circuit around the house before landing allow wires to be observed from multiple angles be enough?
Re: Amazon faces FAA probe after delivery drone snaps internet cable in Texas
#99Earlier 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 chuckled when I read this post. It is well written sarcasm. I will say observing some if the "individual driver vs. X wars" on HN (usually between North Americans), there are many who think this way.
Re: Amazon faces FAA probe after delivery drone snaps internet cable in Texas
#100I'm generally pretty gung ho about tech adoption. Nuclear? Yes! LLMs everywhere? Let's try it! Crypto? OK... give it a go! Self driving cars? Heck yeah! But I really, really don't want drones flying over my house, polluting the already noisy soundscape, etc. This just strikes me as a terrible idea.
I am similar to you. Have you seen the startup that is trying to make a more quiet deliver drone? It flies much higher then uses a long wire to drop the package at the location. The demos on YouTube look pretty cool and you don't hear the drone.