Ask HN: Whatever happened to the “coming wave” of delivery drones?

There are some companies/efforts in the space:

https://www.manna.aero/ https://www.flyzipline.com/ https://wing.com/ https://corporate.walmart.com/newsroom/2022/05/24/were-bring...

Several more out there still from the initial bust.

Regulations make it challenging for beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) autonomous delivery, particularly in the US with the FAA. Also, it's a hard problem in autonomy to nail it every time despite advancements. Less than 1% failure is still potentially catastrophic when you're carrying a few pounds of lithium batteries above people's backyards.

I was working with drones for a while and one issue with carrying weight was distance. If you want a drone capable of carrying weight it has to have a specific size to accommodate the heavy object as well as batteries that get heavier the longer you want to fly and the more power you need to transport said object. Outside of that rules about line of sight were a thing, so you couldn’t just let the drone fly a pre-programmed path but you also needed to see it. There is also a risk of being shot down. I think at the end of the day search and rescue or coast guards might use drones to deliver something very quickly if there is no other way but outside of that I see challenges that are rather hard to overcome.

Are you kidding me? It was all basically vaporware that disappeared when the free money ended. The Kiwi food delivery robots were basically fake -- they only went about 1/8 of a mile automatically. So they'd drive a car to the end of a street with your food and a robot, and then get the robot out of the car, put the food inside, and then the robot would hobble over a couple hundred feet to your door. Absolutely useless.

From https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Kiwibots-win-fa...

> The Kiwibots do not figure out their own routes. Instead, people in Colombia, the home country of Chavez and his two co-founders, plot “waypoints” for the bots to follow, sending them instructions every five to 10 seconds on where to go

> On the ground in Berkeley, people also do a lot of robot support. Traveling at 1 to 1½ mph, the bots would take too long to chug to local restaurants, so Kiwi workers pick up the food at restaurants and take it via bikes or scooters to meeting spots around campus to insert into an insulated bag in the bots’ storage compartment.

> The average distance a robot covers for a delivery is about 200 meters (656 feet, or one-eighth of a mile) which makes them fall short of a “last-mile” solution.

I don't remember where, but I read a lengthy comment from someone in the industry which said there were two main things preventing delivery drones from being a viable market:

1. FAA regulations - delivery drones can't operate within X miles of an airport (technically they can, but it requires a much stricter degree of certification and compliance nobody wants to bother with)

2. Drones need a landing space, so people without yards (like apartment and townhouse dwellers, who make up a lot of the population in exactly the densely populated areas where you'd want to use drones to begin with) can't be served

And it turns out that once you exclude "houses within X miles of an airport" and "houses without an LZ", there aren't enough customers left to make delivery drones worth it.

The flurry of excitement was before the FAA started actively regulating it.

Since then e.g. Amazon is stíll nominally pursuing it, but here's a recent article about how that's going: https://www.businessinsider.com/faa-restrictions-are-curtail...

There's a lot of research done with drones but the world isn't quite ready yet. Realistically, drones delivering packages will get shot down in the US, simply for being unmanned and flying over people's neighbourhoods. People easily feel threatened.

Perhaps more importantly, there's too much that could go wrong. What about legislation where they may fly and how high? What if a drone crashes into someone or something? What if someone's package gets stolen?

As much as the technology enthusiasts in us enjoy the concept of delivery drones, most of us humans still prefer a fellow human in the process of delivering packages to handle edge cases where things might go wrong.

Great question. I'm not aware of any concrete reasons, but I suppose issues relating to these sorts of points:

- despite the sky being generally less constrained than ground delivery there are challenging obstructions, which are potentially far more risky than for ground travel: nudge past many ground obstructions you'd be okay, do the same in the sky, your drone is toast

- liability is far greater in the sky if your drone carrying something comes down in an uncontrolled manner (on someone or something)

- obstructions are likely to be high at the very points people are willing to come meet the drone (antennas, overhead power lines, washing lines, nets, etc) and they're often hard to spot

- unattended drop off is harder for drones in the places where customers are most dense (ie cities) upping the complexity further

- potential regulatory issues (but I understand below certain heights it's generally not regulated in many countries)

- bad PR from noisy drones!

- risks from non customers interfering

- challenges with carrying what you're dropping off: if it's heavy you need bigger drones; if it's light you'd be tying up a drone with something small, unless you can figure how to drop off multiple items, or you have a mixture of drone sizes

They all seem like they could plausibly be solved but I'm no drone engineer!

Maybe it could get going with targeting particular items that are strongly appealing to customers and might narrow the complexities due to being more uniform than a random Amazon basket. I believe an early use in Bhutan was for medical deliveries. Maybe something premium like ice-cream or cocktails might appeal with the right marketing?!

Jeff Bezos, 2013: "There's no reason they can't be effectively used as delivery vehicles"

"It can't be before 2015, because that's the earliest that we can get the rules from the FAA. But it could be 4 or 5 years."

- 10 mile radius from Amazon FC

- half hour delivery

- Objects up to 5 lbs, which is 86% of items Amazon delivered at that time

Said the biggest problems were redundancy, reliability, and safety

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/amazon-ceo-unveils-drone-deliv...

There are still pretty serious technical and engineering hurdles to overcome to make this kind of idea feasible. It was always hype without substance. But even assuming these challenges were overcome, which is inevitable eventually even if it's a century from now, I get the feeling this would largely end up getting banned in many places. I think regular people hanging out in their backyards and going for walks in the neighborhood would feel a vague persistent menace if there were constantly drones zipping around overhead. Think about the fact that you can load up a delivery truck with hundreds of packages at a time. Drones don't have that kind of cargo capacity. The fleet would need to be massive to replace truck deliveries. The sky would be full of them.

I seen some drones in Africa delivering small packages into remote villages, mostly medication. It is small RC airplane (not quad copter), dropping parashutes on an airfield. It replaced much bigger Cesnas.

And drone delivery is quite successful at Ukraine...

My friend had coffee delivered via drone (Canberra, Australia) and it was pretty fun. Certainly feels less wasteful (energetically) than a car & driver. The massive drone was pretty cool, too. That being said, Canberra is probably the perfect city for a drone delivery service, with so much open space.

75% of blood deliveries in Rwanda outside Kigali are done via drone (flyzipline.com)

It's probably because exploiting humans with offering them "gig work" is still cheaper... that and bribing^W lobbying lawmakers to allow continuation said exploitation.

Same thing that happened to self driving cars, bloodless blood tests, the 'Metaverse', and 'Social Media but with Nice People'.

The point of the thing is to have an impossibile to achieve project that is nonetheless popular enough to generate endless rounds of new investment.

From a European perspective: regulation is just catching up. Risk assessment and safety frameworks have been established and (non-autonomous) beyond line of sight operations are slowly becoming feasible to do on a regular basis. Operating many drones (+ manned vehicles) in the same airspace needs a traffic management solution (U-Space) which is also seeing some initial trial runs now.

Wing seems to be making solid real-world progress. They regularly post updates to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Wing/videos

Wing (Google) and a few others have it open to the public in suburbs in South East Queensland Australia atm. Have ordered a drink through door dash to try it out before and it seems to work pretty well.

It wouldn't surprise me if the kinks are being ironed out here before opening it up in bigger markets.

There were a fair few complaints about the noise for the logan ones when they first came out but apparently they are "mostly" sorted now.

- https://www.facebook.com/7NEWSBrisbane/videos/logan-is-becom... - https://doordash.news/australia/doordash-and-wing-announce-p... - https://www.businessnewsaustralia.com/articles/wing-s-drone-...

It's kinda here, Zipline is delivering high value products to places that don't have good infrastructure, and has gotten some big inventions in propeller designs to get rid of noise.

The “killer app” (pun intended) for drone delivery was precision delivery of high explosive munitions to their target. Increasingly, they also deliver supplies.

At these tasks, they excel and are in so much demand that both sides of the Russian invasion of Ukraine can’t produce enough quantity to meet demand.

There's a trial near me of ground-based autonomous delivery robots (though it doesn't cover my area) which seems to have been pretty successful. People are using it and it seems to work pretty well from what my friends in the area have said. There have of course been a few hiccups but nothing major (it helps that the delivery robots are cute and will ask for help if they are stuck or need something like a button pushing to use a pedestrian crossing). The main limitation is that their range is only about 2 miles so they basically are only really saving you a quick trip to a nearby shop.

I live in an area with Wing drone delivery. On a typical day I hear approximately zero drones flying, and we have only personally used it 5-6 times in 3 years (mostly as a novelty to impress kids that are visiting).

There isn't that great a selection of stuff that you can get, and some stores have come and gone from the app.

It's just not that useful. We live in the suburbs, and a weekly trip to the grocery store or big box store (5-10 min drives) can get so much more and at a better price than buying things individually. It's kind of like milk delivery - it made sense before refrigeration but after that, you would buy weekly and just store it.

And right now delivery is free, but it would be even worse if/when it isn't.

One area where it could work is coffee/tea delivery (Starbucks, etc). These are things you buy individually and typically everyday. But AFAIK we don't have that and its not on the horizon.

We have autonomous robots that deliver groceries where we live, through a company called Starship.

They definitely felt like the future when they first arrived, zipping along the pavement or waiting patiently to cross a road. My daughter loves counting them as we drive past.

Great video on the current state of drone air delivery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMqbj4Kj-z0

Basically Amazon is massively hampered by FAA regulations that say they can't fly drones beyond operator line of sight. In other words, the remote pilot must be able to see the drone at all times. It's also that drone delivery was never meant to replace all deliveries. It's only specific use cases where it is economical, such as delivery to a lone, rural house, where sending a car would be time consuming and expensive. You can get waivers for the line of sight rule but it requires sophisticated auto-avoidance tech that they're still working on (that must handle automated avoidance in rain or shine, night and day, clouds or not, winds and so on). So it's massively hard problem that was never meant to be a whole "wave" of next gen delivery.

> Food delivery companies as well seemed to be testing out robots that would bring your food to you albeit in a more sidewalk bound way

Former delivery robot startup cofounder (Robby Technologies) here. To be honest hardware was by far the most time-consuming thing. I wanted to spend 80%+ of our engineering time and funds on software but it turned out that we ended up spending 80%+ of the time dealing with electromechanical issues, supply chain issues, bad USB cables, motor controller issues, shitty crimping jobs, thermal management, plastic breakage, bad PCBs, bad BMS, bad lithium cells, snapping drive belts, malfunctioning locks, malfunctioning cameras, manufacturer-mislabeled motor wires, sensors that didn't meet specs, antenna placement and RF interference, and lots more. Then there was the operational overhead of figuring out how to charge, move, and store all of them, and how to get things in/out of them when businesses weren't willing to walk from the store to the sidewalk to drop something in a robot, and the customers weren't always willing to come outside to grab their stuff. Then there were robots that got stuck in potholes and the like, and had to be rescued by driving out to them. All that while trying to scale up manufacturing, which never really happened beyond a certain scale. Guess how much time we had left for writing autonomous software.

The thing is, autonomous driving, especially on the sidewalk is actually much easier than the hardware problem of figuring out how to design, build, and scale a new type of vehicle from scratch. The main issue is we, and likely all the other companies, were stuck in a hellhole of hardware problems that something was always "on fire" hardware-wise.

In retrospect I see the companies that went to the roads instead of the sidewalks had it slightly easier on the hardware side: they could just buy a reliable car and mod it, and get to work on software. Safety-wise, of course, they have it much harder, it's a trade-off.

I live in a Durham, NC and there is a small radius where a company called Flytrex does drone food delivery. We use it every couple weeks since they have almost no fees unlike Uber Eats. From what I understand they place the order, drive a car to pick up your food, drive back to the launch pad, then load and send the drone. It then drops the food using a long cable that leaves behind a reusable bag in your front lawn. It’s surprisingly accurate since it has about a 15ft diameter circle to hit in my front yard to avoid trees and the house. The one downside is the weight limit and weather. If you go over something like 8 pounds then the drone will fly what it can and someone will follow begging in a car with the remainder. Bad weather means car delivery.