Wal-Mart seeks to test drones for home delivery
1–10 of 47 posts
Re: Wal-Mart seeks to test drones for home delivery
#2I'm ok with quiet, unmanned, self-driving delivery trucks that automate the package delivery process. I am not looking forward to delivery drones buzzing around overhead becoming a normal occurrence.
Re: Wal-Mart seeks to test drones for home delivery
#3Amazon must have them absolutely terrified.
Re: Wal-Mart seeks to test drones for home delivery
#4I'm ok with quiet, unmanned, self-driving delivery trucks that automate the package delivery process. I am not looking forward to delivery drones buzzing around overhead becoming a normal occurrence.
They won't. They're an absurd impracticality anywhere outside of Silicon Valley (suburban homes, no weather ever), and completely unnecessary even in those ideal conditions.
People are excited because they're cool toys, not because it actually solves a problem.
Re: Wal-Mart seeks to test drones for home delivery
#5I'm curious because every battery operated "drone" I've seen has a pretty limited range and flight time. Some of the higher-end multicopters built for videography can carry a decent camera for maybe a half hour but it seems like for deliveries, you'd be really limited in terms of weight carried and distance. The thing still has to get back to the warehouse even if it manages to land, drop the package, and fly back without hitting anything.
I say this as a big fan of hobbyist multicopters as well. The more automated the solution, the less useful and feasible it seems to me. I guess you could have someone at the "home base" watching a camera feed over LTE and maybe the latency wouldn't be so bad but just in terms of logistics, I can't see how some battery-powered DJI multicopter would be of much use outside of some edge cases.
Still, I guess it's cool to see companies experimenting. Sometimes you learn one thing by trying another. And on the surface it really does seem to make more sense to fly a small, battery-powered craft to drop off small items rather than having to drive a car back and forth across town to deliver a t-shirt or a roll of TP.
Re: Wal-Mart seeks to test drones for home delivery
#6Seems pretty inefficient to fly things, because the energy needed to keep it floating in air. Although history tells us never to say never about technology, it seems like having small autonomous robots on wheels. They could travel on the sidewalks in cities, and also go the fastest way straight thru forest (for the many who live outside of cities).
Re: Wal-Mart seeks to test drones for home delivery
#7They could also use cannons and shells with parachute for delivery in Silicon Valley area. Well, looks like I missed another startup opportunity...
Re: Wal-Mart seeks to test drones for home delivery
#8Seems pretty inefficient to fly things, because the energy needed to keep it floating in air. Although history tells us never to say never about technology, it seems like having small autonomous robots on wheels. They could travel on the sidewalks in cities, and also go the fastest way straight thru forest (for the many who live outside of cities).
Flying has got to be more efficient than traveling through a forest.
As a person who spends a lot of time in the forest, there's a ton of impassable obstacles. Cliff faces, streams, briar patches, downed logs, etc.
The robot on the ground would spend more energy in the forest than the robot in the sky.
I think being in the sky also helps keep them from being a target for looting.
Re: Wal-Mart seeks to test drones for home delivery
#9Amazon must have them absolutely terrified.
My guess would be that they wrote anything they could think of into the application so that they can play around without doing another one.
Given their scale, a few million spent on this or that doesn't say much about what they will actually end up doing.
Re: Wal-Mart seeks to test drones for home delivery
#10I'm ok with quiet, unmanned, self-driving delivery trucks that automate the package delivery process. I am not looking forward to delivery drones buzzing around overhead becoming a normal occurrence.
They won't. They're an absurd impracticality anywhere outside of Silicon Valley (suburban homes, no weather ever), and completely unnecessary even in those ideal conditions. People are excited because they're cool toys, not because it actually solves a problem.
Indeed. Even ignoring the total impracticality of them, you can also look at just energy issues.
In order for drones to be cost effective, they need to stay in the air for minimum the full trip out and back from the home, but if you look at the location of most big warehouses (e.g. Amazon, Walmart) they're built outside of big cities for cost reasons, so now you have to fly twice as far to deliver packages onto the opposite side of the city.
So either the FAA will need to allow liquid fuel drones (gas, diesel, etc) which have their own safety issues, or they'll need to be extremely large to hold enough batteries. Plus the recharge time of batteries will also be an issue.
I think weather and safety are their biggest detractors, but I think energy problems are next on that list. All these companies keep doing is pumping out press releases but without any specific details about how far their drones can travel, under what conditions, etc.
I'd short sell anyone who announced they're going to invest in making this work. It is fine as a pet project and to get some publicity, but if they start throwing millions behind it, I'm betting against them and it.