The connotations of "drone" are not great. (The next word in the bi-gram would be "strike"...) Maybe we can go back to "UAV" or pick another term for non-militarized, commercial delivery.
"UAV" has stronger military connotations for me. I'm not sure it's inherently better. Maybe something entirely new is better? "AAV" Autonomous Ariel Vehicle, or something similar?
Or just UAS, since the UAM air taxis that are coming and are largely being lumped in with these deliveries aren’t very small at all.
For what it’s worth, at NASA the official term is (s)UAS, but we use that and UAV, drone, etc interchangeably has in day to day conversation. As long as it’s clear what you’re talking about, the exact word is really not that important.
In 2006 a “drone” carried hellfire missiles. At some point in the last decade, that shifted and now a drone is a small hobby quad-copter. Language is funny.
> The connotations of "drone" are not great. (The next word in the bi-gram would be "strike"...) Maybe we can go back to "UAV" or pick another term for non-militarized, commercial delivery.
You have your connotations backwards. You'll see no consumer drones marketed as UAVs, but plenty of military drones are called that.
Yeah, I can see that. Too bad because "drone" also has the connotation of "dumb" or "slave", which is the opposite of what you want an autonomous vehicle to be that's sharing your airspace. (It makes more sense in the remotely-piloted case, as in the military versions.) But words take on their own lives, and I guess there are now "drones".
Seeing the specs of Google Wing (backed by much more capital), I'm yet more impressed with Zipline drone.
Wing has about 10km round-trip (unclear if that's radius or total distance traveled), while Zipline has about 80km radius or 160km round-trip range. Wing has a speed of about 60mph (then slows to a hover for extending the package) while Zipline travels at 80mph.
And not just serving a small city of 20,000 but Rwanda, a nation of 12 million (and now much of Ghana, population of 28 million, and soon the state of Maharashtra in India with a population of over 100 million).
I really think the catapult and parachute approach is significantly more effective than the hover-and-deploy one is. There are some marginal advantages to hovering, but the drawbacks in range, efficiency, time, and annoyance to the neighbors outweigh them.
The advantages to hovering may be relevant in dense cities, but these are exactly the places which would not want lots of drones flying around everywhere (certainly not hovering like that).
Still, much safer than delivery vans and I hope Wing is successful.
As long as you launch an object capable of aerodynamic control (glider), you can compensate for wind by launching with excess energy/speed. Launching could be easy by a catapult of a couple hundred meters (50m distance for 100m/s speed gives 10g, 200m distance for 200m/s gives those same 10g.
My best idea would be a flywheel, because for 5kg mass (including a sled/rope), and assuming force-limited operation, you'd need 100kW peak power at the end for the 200m long 200m/s exit speed installation.
Spin the flywheel, and engage a clutch to connect it with a winch that pulls the sled via a (Dyneema) rope. There are magnetic clutches that provide precise control over the force, allowing it to run the glider/rope near their structural limits.
Rough, back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest viability of 25m long catapults that launch suitable freight at ~200m/s, but "suitable" here means ~100g, likely requiring fancy rigid foam fillers for the box and limiting to sufficiently solid freight.
If you figure out how to dig a 100~400m deep, 2~3m diameter hole cheaply, you could save massive horizontal space. Launching out of an elevator shaft of a highrise or on the wall of a tall building could be practical, too. Just drag a thin rope up behind the sled, and use it to pull the main rope back up. The sled should be far too light on it's own. Click/hook in the next glider, while getting the flywheel back up to speed. This should allow 10~20s spacing on a single sled/guide, and up to ~2s if you robot-mount the glider fast enough to the next sled on an array of parallel guide rails. As soon as one glider clears the launch space, the next one could be moved in. That'd be important to the economics of building / converting a tower for such a use case.
And even if the contents require long (and thus horizontal) catapults, it might be feasible to launch the empty glider from much smaller (50m vertical would also solve most clearance issues) facilities to use most of the range for actual delivery.
You can pull certain tricks with ballistic delivery methods. A depressed trajectory (flatter profile, lower apogee) would give you the option of coming in through a window, with an additional benefit in that it would be harder to intercept the payload.
You would also need to limit this strategy to payloads that can withstand shock loads of multiple hundreds of G (soups and hard cheese, maybe even bread adequately packaged. may need a different method for floral deliveries).
Proof of concept shouldn't be too difficult, most of the tech already exists (Raytheon and Northop-Grumman have had a handle on it for decades). DHS might not be too amused, however.
> would give you the option of coming in through a window
You're thinking too small. I want my uber eats delivery to land directly on the plate in my cupboard before I even set it on the table. Please provide appropriate ballistic modelling for this thankyou
The catapult launches the drone, not the package. The package is delivered as normal and the drone is then returned and "caught" with a pretty impressive hook system for redeployment.
The package is not delivered "as normal" - it's dropped via parachute. The parent poster's point is that delivering things via parachute comes with all kinds of risks in comparison to targeted landings (ex. wind gusts during drop, power lines, blowing onto a roof, parachute failure causing breakage, etc.)
These are similar risks to the Google Wing concept. The parachute has fewer risks of collision with the vehicle since the vehicle is nearby for a much shorter period of time and is not making a flightmode transition.
The issue is simply a matter of minimum required landing area. Hovering could be a little smaller than parachute delivery (16 ft), but still must have a "safe area" is approximately similar because the vehicle must hover without nearby obstructions.
From what I've seen, Zipline is being run between managed locations, rather than delivering to random points on the map, but I could be wrong about that, I last read about it a couple of years ago.
Also, like a lot of solutions, this doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to be better than the alternatives, which Zipline appears to be in the places it is being used.
That remains to be seen. Yes, traffic has its toll, we are all quite aware of it. But we do not have the numbers on drones in large deployments carrying packages so that seems premature.
Multiroters seem like such an inefficient way to do this, why is everyone doing that rather than a fixed wing aircraft? I know in the mid 20th century some mail was delivered this way using manually piloted aircraft and very little ground crew (none had to be active when the package was picked up or dropped off.)
It appears to be a fixed-wing aircraft that also has rotors, to hover as it makes the delivery. Assuming there's not a suitable space to land and take off again and you don't want packages randomly parachuting to the ground, this seems like the best way to do it.
That problem was solved long ago. Land on the roof and drop the packages down the chimney. Most roofs can handle a flying sled and 8 reindeer, so handling a small delivery drone should be no problem.
I lived under the flight paths near LAX for awhile. It was incessant and obvious, all the time. Aircraft engines are hard to ignore and they would rattle the windows (which were sound resistant). One of my goals in life is to never live somewhere like that again. It isn't bad until you live under a major one, then you realize it can be a constantly present annoyance.
Cars are definitely much more common in cities now that horses were around, say, 1900. Most people just walked.
Cars also seem to have exerted a much greater impact in terms of getting cities to design themselves primarily around themselves (probably because of that popularity).
Hopefully driverless vehicles can make this redundant. I'd prefer quiet electric robots zipping around the streets to noisy drones in the air.
What problem is drone delivery actually solving? How often are people sitting at home and need a delivery dispatched right now. Food delivery seems to be the only compelling use case. Maybe the occasional "out of toilet paper" emergency?
Or perhaps on demand delivery becomes so easy that it changes people's behaviour to JIT all their shopping.
Autonomous drone delivery "solves" many of the issues when compared to having the FedEx/UPS truck and a driver drive to my location, not the least of which is the small army of locally-based drivers who want to be paid in local wages.
Depending on who you ask, driverless vehicles are either right around the corner, or 5-10 years away. Meanwhile, drone delivery is possible, right now, and the airspace above my house is generally empty. (It's being done "in prod" for medicine delivery in Rwanda. iirc those are not autonomous though.)
Like delivery options that exist now, I wouldn't expect drone delivery to be instantaneous either.
I’m a researcher working in this field. Believe me when I tell you that at least in the US we are very concerned with the nuisance these things may pose. If we do our job well, these will be no more of a nuisance than helicopters and airplanes today.
This is about how much noise your aircraft are allowed to create. What you should be able to hear in the street are the tweeting of birds in the camellias, the tinkle of coffee spoons and the sound of human voices.
It wouldn't be the first time we littered the skies of our cities with delivery technology, although it was for message deliver rather than goods delivery [1].
My one prediction for the future: drone delivery mini platforms next to windows (with 2d "barcodes" printed on top) will be the most visible sign of the 20s -- comparable to satellite dishes in the 90s
It's more likely you'll have centralized drone delivery hubs - i.e. one place in your apartment building - rather than every window or patio having a delivery spot.
Every drone is going to record everything using multiple cameras and send them to their backend. That is quiet disconcerting. There are no legally set paths for the drones so they are free to go everywhere and see everything. Amazon and Google are probably salivating more at the prospects of getting these videos than the actual delivery itself. I am concerned about startups in the bay and even more so about companies from China and elsewhere that create these drones. At least with Google and Amazon we can cry foul and pressure them into not doing somethings. With the rest of the ecosystem its a free for all.
Presumably the videos will mainly be overhead views - what kind of nefarious uses do you fear they could put such images to? (genuinely curious; I had the same thought, but I'm not sure why)
There was the application of tracking vehicles for fighting crime that has been proposed. With enough data, you can "rewind" and "fast forward" time to see where criminals came from, who they coordinated with, etc.
All well and good as long as they're criminals... But there's nothing to ensure it's used for that. Imagine Uber God mode for all vehicles.
Where's the commercial imperative in that, though? The challenge isn't to work out disturbing applications for this kind of aerial surveillance - that's easy - it's to work out profitable applications that would cause a business to want to invest in it.
Right but what happens when you have coverage that is refreshed every hour or even less? You then have another surveillance network, one which is very hard to opt out of
I think we're way past that point already. Everyone with a phone already has their location tracked at least by their phone company. You might've even given it away to other companies willingly: https://www.google.com/maps/timeline.
I don't think there were that many unintended consequences from this tech. We got better traffic jam maps. And maybe a handful of criminals who forgot to leave their phone at home got caught.
I think this is one of those things that people growing up with the tech won't think anything of it (mom wants to always know your location) but old geezers will reminisce of a time where we still had to call a landline and talk a friend's parents first to see if they are home.
> I don't think there were that many unintended consequences from this tech.
Honestly the last time I saw a drone, the most annoying thing about it was its noise. I can't imagine them buzzing around all the time simply because of that.
Have you heard a drone? even tiny ones are loud as shit. some guy in my neighborhood flies his drone occasionally and it's super annoying. I can't imagine how annoying these giant drones delivering packages will be.
Yes, I fly them professionally. The sound is related to the size, pitch, and profile of the propellers as well as the speed they are spinning.
The reason the guy down the street is probably loud is he is flying a race drone and hitting very high RPMs with it.
It seems that due to frangibility concerns, Project Wing uses much smaller motors and props now which requires a higher RPM to beat the air into submission.
This was one of the leading complaints in the testing of Wing in Australia IIUC.
Delivery worked, but neighbors complained that the drones sounded like they were powered by the chained souls of the thousand hungry damned. They've apparently worked hard to get the sound down to a mere hundred hungry damned. ;)
The amount of public photography doubling over and over in an exponential increase of surveillance is a serious problem that cannot be dismissed with a simple "the act is legal and always has been".
In a legal studies class I took we compared two cases taking about (IRRC) unreasonable searches. In one, a police officer walking a beat saw some drugs/guns/etc. through a window and promptly got a warrant for a search. In another, the police "happened to be doing some aerial photography" over a weed farm and thence got a warrant etc. IIRC, the former was fine, the latter wasn't, basically because of the definitions of "ordinary" or something like that.
Obviously IAMNL, YMMV, etc., but the legal system does care about degree of normalcy.
Ps: if someone can better fill in the details I'm sure these are commonly studied cases and that I've butchered the facts. Please correct me!
Since around 2011 Google has been flying its own missions to collect 6 inch (15 cm) pixel imagery across the entire United States... goal is to have nationwide imagery that is no older than three years old everywhere, and to have imagery that is no older than one year in the largest metropolitan regions in the USA
Eagleview and Nearmap are other companies doing the same thing.
Although every new technology comes with negative and unforeseen consequences, history tells us that on the whole, new technology is desirable.
Even though the photograph changed the intimacy and privacy of face to face interaction, and the electric streetlight made public spaces artificial and impersonal, these new technologies certainly did more good than harm.
We should embrace the good that will come from new technologies. I for one and looking forward to a future where my packages are delivered quickly and securely, and I'm willing to accept that as a side effect Google will have slightly better ads.
Nope, I used to work there on non-ads, so I know that they are not doing anything nefarious and also that targeted ads have higher conversion rates.
I often have packages stolen or undelivered, so Ads and advertising companies are like #9999 on my list of things that I'm worried about when I think about deliveries.
When calculating "out of touch," it's worth keeping in mind that Hacker News is its own bubble (and tends to skew further in the privacy-paranoid direction than the public average).
The consequences of this technology are quite obvious. Noise pollution. Flying camera systems pollution. Drone pollution.
There are also obvious privacy issues - if such drones will ever allowed to become commonplace, some percentage of drones will probably look like Fedex, but would be operated by other actors.
I think, proper application of such drones could be emergency services. Perform emergency delivery, use drones to establish a temporary passage for an emergency vehicle, ...
I’m a researcher in this field. First, do you have any evidence that routes are unrestricted? I’m not involved in this particular test, but my guess is that there are extremely specific restrictions. In the more general case, the US government (primarily NASA and the FAA) are actively working on coming up with the regulations that will cover this on a permanent basis, and they will absolutely consider privacy among literally hundreds of other factors.
The core premise of the technology is delivery to every home. To deliver to every home, you need to have a camera pointed to every home, and their neighbors, and the people / cars on the street. Not sure what your point is, are you proposing drones are going to fly blind due to some regulation? Can _you_ provide evidence of such regulation?
Are you asking us to trust megacorps to not make maximum use of their surveillance data? When they've been caught time and again with the hand in the privacy cookie jar? When they turned the Internet into a 24/7 panopticon, with every web page carrying tens of surveillance beacons connected to the motherhive?
Restricting routes to following existing streets would limit the privacy issues considerably. A drone following the street should not need to look at much other than the what is on or next to the street.
Compare to no route restrictions, where you would probably have the drones flying over people's back yards, which would be a considerable reduction in privacy.
if drones are just following existing streets, there's nothing innovative with drone delivery... it will just be ridiculously more inefficient than todays modes of delivery.
No sane vendor will agree to these sort of terms and these companies do not care about privacy, they are all in the data mining and advertising business.
Besides the points already mentioned by shadowgovt, another big advantage of drones over existing modes of delivery even if drones have to follow existing streets is that they can be self-flying fairly easily.
Unlike self-driving cars, self-flying drones do not have to worry about people running into their path, cars parked in the parking lane adjacent to their line suddenly opening a door into their line, or sharing the road with unpredictable human driven vehicles.
The drone route regulations will be starting with routes that have no other traffic except birds and insects. The routes can be designed so that there are different levels for north, south, east, and west travel, so except at the endpoints a drone never has to worry about encountering another drone moving in a different direction. It only has to deal with drones coming up from behind or coming up on drones ahead of it.
Are you suggesting that these drones will follow streets for the entirety of their routes? Doesn't that nearly defeat the purpose of flying? Can you imagine if airplanes had to follow interstates for their entire flights?
Fair point, but it’s a very fuzzy line. In some contexts I don’t call myself a researcher because I’m not a PhD and O don’t publish much. In this context, I think I bring exactly the same context as any other researcher on my team.
The basic question being whether the vehicles are flying restricted routes? Because those sorts of details are very much determined for an individual test and as I said I’m not involved with this one.
Our drone with deep learning noticed your front door has an old style doorbell with no camera. Would you like us to notify Amazon to ship you a Ring doorbell?
Why do drones need visual aids when flying to the destination? I can imagine an autonomous car needing to "look" at things because humans and human-defined conventions are involved. Can the drone simply not position itself using GPS, mobile networks, wifi access points etc? The camera might be required only when it is time to slow down and drop the parcel.
Aircraft need to be able to see other aircraft so as not to collide with them. Especially so if you foresee a future where delivery drones are as common as cars.
They also need to avoid obstacles that aren't on their digital maps, like newly erected cranes, and moving things like birds, parachutists and gliders.
Of course, you could argue they don't need to store the videos they take, or transfer them off the drone, other than a last-60-seconds-flight-recorder for crash investigation.
>Aircraft need to be able to see other aircraft so as not to collide with them. Especially so if you foresee a future where delivery drones are as common as cars.
Cameras are not being used for this job.
>They also need to avoid obstacles that aren't on their digital maps, like newly erected cranes, and moving things like birds, parachutists and gliders.
Cameras can be used for these, however it's better to use other sensors as the primary means of detection.
I hate the idea of polluting the open air with the noise and visual pollution of drones, though I guess we're killing off the birds so we need something to replace them so why not a drone delivering an impulse purchase of chapstick.
If drone delivery takes off, I'm curious how weather will impact the sector. E.g. One week drones deliver 60% of goods in a city, but the next one rains all week with wind and storms - suddenly demand for human deliverypeople spikes.
Currently they will be sticking to daylight hours and calm enough weather. Also due to the valley here, they will have to worry about days with low clouds due to temperature inversions.
I see drones as one of the potential solutions to last mile delivery, co-existing with other technologies.
So they'll need a bunch of on-demand, part-time delivery partners willing to take up the slack when drones can't fly? Sounds like they'll still need to employ (if indirectly) enough humans to meet peak demand.
> Walgreens said in a release that 78% of the US population lives within 5 miles of one of its stores
Perhaps, but I imagine a decent chunk of these folks are in places like NYC, which probably won't see drone delivery from retail Walgreens stores. I wonder what percent of the population lives within 5 miles of a suburban Walgreens, which might conceivably be able to offer drone-based delivery.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadFor what it’s worth, at NASA the official term is (s)UAS, but we use that and UAV, drone, etc interchangeably has in day to day conversation. As long as it’s clear what you’re talking about, the exact word is really not that important.
You have your connotations backwards. You'll see no consumer drones marketed as UAVs, but plenty of military drones are called that.
> Maximum altitude of 400 feet above ground level (AGL) or, if higher than 400 feet AGL, remain within 400 feet of a structure.
You can also apply for a waiver.
As long as it is under 55 lbs. is counted as a sUAS under FAA regulations.
Wing has about 10km round-trip (unclear if that's radius or total distance traveled), while Zipline has about 80km radius or 160km round-trip range. Wing has a speed of about 60mph (then slows to a hover for extending the package) while Zipline travels at 80mph.
And not just serving a small city of 20,000 but Rwanda, a nation of 12 million (and now much of Ghana, population of 28 million, and soon the state of Maharashtra in India with a population of over 100 million).
I really think the catapult and parachute approach is significantly more effective than the hover-and-deploy one is. There are some marginal advantages to hovering, but the drawbacks in range, efficiency, time, and annoyance to the neighbors outweigh them.
The advantages to hovering may be relevant in dense cities, but these are exactly the places which would not want lots of drones flying around everywhere (certainly not hovering like that).
Still, much safer than delivery vans and I hope Wing is successful.
Real Engineering [1] and Wendover Productions [2] have really nice videos about their system currently deployed in Rwanda.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEbRVNxL44c [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnoUBfLxZz0
My best idea would be a flywheel, because for 5kg mass (including a sled/rope), and assuming force-limited operation, you'd need 100kW peak power at the end for the 200m long 200m/s exit speed installation.
Spin the flywheel, and engage a clutch to connect it with a winch that pulls the sled via a (Dyneema) rope. There are magnetic clutches that provide precise control over the force, allowing it to run the glider/rope near their structural limits.
Rough, back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest viability of 25m long catapults that launch suitable freight at ~200m/s, but "suitable" here means ~100g, likely requiring fancy rigid foam fillers for the box and limiting to sufficiently solid freight.
If you figure out how to dig a 100~400m deep, 2~3m diameter hole cheaply, you could save massive horizontal space. Launching out of an elevator shaft of a highrise or on the wall of a tall building could be practical, too. Just drag a thin rope up behind the sled, and use it to pull the main rope back up. The sled should be far too light on it's own. Click/hook in the next glider, while getting the flywheel back up to speed. This should allow 10~20s spacing on a single sled/guide, and up to ~2s if you robot-mount the glider fast enough to the next sled on an array of parallel guide rails. As soon as one glider clears the launch space, the next one could be moved in. That'd be important to the economics of building / converting a tower for such a use case.
And even if the contents require long (and thus horizontal) catapults, it might be feasible to launch the empty glider from much smaller (50m vertical would also solve most clearance issues) facilities to use most of the range for actual delivery.
You would also need to limit this strategy to payloads that can withstand shock loads of multiple hundreds of G (soups and hard cheese, maybe even bread adequately packaged. may need a different method for floral deliveries).
Proof of concept shouldn't be too difficult, most of the tech already exists (Raytheon and Northop-Grumman have had a handle on it for decades). DHS might not be too amused, however.
You're thinking too small. I want my uber eats delivery to land directly on the plate in my cupboard before I even set it on the table. Please provide appropriate ballistic modelling for this thankyou
The issue is simply a matter of minimum required landing area. Hovering could be a little smaller than parachute delivery (16 ft), but still must have a "safe area" is approximately similar because the vehicle must hover without nearby obstructions.
Also, like a lot of solutions, this doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to be better than the alternatives, which Zipline appears to be in the places it is being used.
What is that thought based on? Have you studied this field in depth?
What makes you write that?
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/amazon...
They must have changed for good reasons.
So the sky is going to be littered with drones delivering packages in ten to 20 years? Present day that seems ridiculous and unattractive!
Cars also seem to have exerted a much greater impact in terms of getting cities to design themselves primarily around themselves (probably because of that popularity).
What problem is drone delivery actually solving? How often are people sitting at home and need a delivery dispatched right now. Food delivery seems to be the only compelling use case. Maybe the occasional "out of toilet paper" emergency?
Or perhaps on demand delivery becomes so easy that it changes people's behaviour to JIT all their shopping.
Depending on who you ask, driverless vehicles are either right around the corner, or 5-10 years away. Meanwhile, drone delivery is possible, right now, and the airspace above my house is generally empty. (It's being done "in prod" for medicine delivery in Rwanda. iirc those are not autonomous though.)
Like delivery options that exist now, I wouldn't expect drone delivery to be instantaneous either.
In a well-designed city noise sources would be under the ground or at a ground level, behind a sound barrier. They wouldn't be placed at altitude.
Perhaps like this - Life in the Spanish City that banned cars. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/sep/18/paradise-life...
This is about how much noise your aircraft are allowed to create. What you should be able to hear in the street are the tweeting of birds in the camellias, the tinkle of coffee spoons and the sound of human voices.
[1] https://io9.gizmodo.com/photos-from-the-days-when-thousands-...
All well and good as long as they're criminals... But there's nothing to ensure it's used for that. Imagine Uber God mode for all vehicles.
I don't think there were that many unintended consequences from this tech. We got better traffic jam maps. And maybe a handful of criminals who forgot to leave their phone at home got caught.
I think this is one of those things that people growing up with the tech won't think anything of it (mom wants to always know your location) but old geezers will reminisce of a time where we still had to call a landline and talk a friend's parents first to see if they are home.
Honestly the last time I saw a drone, the most annoying thing about it was its noise. I can't imagine them buzzing around all the time simply because of that.
They're also intended to do things like saving people's lives, not delivering their Amazon orders.
The reason the guy down the street is probably loud is he is flying a race drone and hitting very high RPMs with it.
It seems that due to frangibility concerns, Project Wing uses much smaller motors and props now which requires a higher RPM to beat the air into submission.
You might say _impact on others_ was one of the most important things they had to address with the FAA.
Delivery worked, but neighbors complained that the drones sounded like they were powered by the chained souls of the thousand hungry damned. They've apparently worked hard to get the sound down to a mere hundred hungry damned. ;)
Obviously IAMNL, YMMV, etc., but the legal system does care about degree of normalcy.
Ps: if someone can better fill in the details I'm sure these are commonly studied cases and that I've butchered the facts. Please correct me!
https://www.appgeo.com/maps-pointers/google-now-selling-aeri...
Since around 2011 Google has been flying its own missions to collect 6 inch (15 cm) pixel imagery across the entire United States... goal is to have nationwide imagery that is no older than three years old everywhere, and to have imagery that is no older than one year in the largest metropolitan regions in the USA
Eagleview and Nearmap are other companies doing the same thing.
Even though the photograph changed the intimacy and privacy of face to face interaction, and the electric streetlight made public spaces artificial and impersonal, these new technologies certainly did more good than harm.
We should embrace the good that will come from new technologies. I for one and looking forward to a future where my packages are delivered quickly and securely, and I'm willing to accept that as a side effect Google will have slightly better ads.
This is so out of touch that I have to assume you are trolling or work for "ALPHABET". At least that would be an explanation.
I often have packages stolen or undelivered, so Ads and advertising companies are like #9999 on my list of things that I'm worried about when I think about deliveries.
There are also obvious privacy issues - if such drones will ever allowed to become commonplace, some percentage of drones will probably look like Fedex, but would be operated by other actors.
I think, proper application of such drones could be emergency services. Perform emergency delivery, use drones to establish a temporary passage for an emergency vehicle, ...
Are you asking us to trust megacorps to not make maximum use of their surveillance data? When they've been caught time and again with the hand in the privacy cookie jar? When they turned the Internet into a 24/7 panopticon, with every web page carrying tens of surveillance beacons connected to the motherhive?
Compare to no route restrictions, where you would probably have the drones flying over people's back yards, which would be a considerable reduction in privacy.
No sane vendor will agree to these sort of terms and these companies do not care about privacy, they are all in the data mining and advertising business.
Unlike self-driving cars, self-flying drones do not have to worry about people running into their path, cars parked in the parking lane adjacent to their line suddenly opening a door into their line, or sharing the road with unpredictable human driven vehicles.
The drone route regulations will be starting with routes that have no other traffic except birds and insects. The routes can be designed so that there are different levels for north, south, east, and west travel, so except at the endpoints a drone never has to worry about encountering another drone moving in a different direction. It only has to deal with drones coming up from behind or coming up on drones ahead of it.
They also need to avoid obstacles that aren't on their digital maps, like newly erected cranes, and moving things like birds, parachutists and gliders.
Of course, you could argue they don't need to store the videos they take, or transfer them off the drone, other than a last-60-seconds-flight-recorder for crash investigation.
There are some other exceptions as well IIRC for gliders, ultra lights and some others.
Cameras are not being used for this job.
>They also need to avoid obstacles that aren't on their digital maps, like newly erected cranes, and moving things like birds, parachutists and gliders.
Cameras can be used for these, however it's better to use other sensors as the primary means of detection.
Certainly not in the near future, and probably not ever for delivery drones. Such systems would require unreasonable additional payload.
Everything a drone can see is in public, same as any other camera man, airplane, helicopter, or satellite.
How utterly depressing.
I see drones as one of the potential solutions to last mile delivery, co-existing with other technologies.
Perhaps, but I imagine a decent chunk of these folks are in places like NYC, which probably won't see drone delivery from retail Walgreens stores. I wonder what percent of the population lives within 5 miles of a suburban Walgreens, which might conceivably be able to offer drone-based delivery.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKErmCN78S8
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-12/canberra-delivery-dro...