Amazon to trial delivery-by-drone

[SystemParanoia]

Greg66 said:

valiant said:

What about airspace?

Doing a little reading (always a bit dangerous) I own the airspace above my property to around 500 ft. If the Amadrone enters my airspace without my prior permission can I do them for trespass or charge them a hefty fee for access?

I sense my annual prime fee becoming free in the near future...

Why would it have to enter your airspace? Obvious solution is to fly over the roads using sat nav technology. Get to the deliver address, then turn off the road over the addressee's land.

Or just fly at 501 ft

[eccles]

Greg66 said:

valiant said:

What about airspace?

Doing a little reading (always a bit dangerous) I own the airspace above my property to around 500 ft. If the Amadrone enters my airspace without my prior permission can I do them for trespass or charge them a hefty fee for access?

I sense my annual prime fee becoming free in the near future...

Why would it have to enter your airspace? Obvious solution is to fly over the roads using sat nav technology. Get to the deliver address, then turn off the road over the addressee's land.

Why would you waste valuable battery power flying longer than you had to? I think the phrase is 'as the crow flies'.

[anonymous-user]

eccles said:

Greg66 said:

valiant said:

What about airspace?

Doing a little reading (always a bit dangerous) I own the airspace above my property to around 500 ft. If the Amadrone enters my airspace without my prior permission can I do them for trespass or charge them a hefty fee for access?

I sense my annual prime fee becoming free in the near future...

Why would it have to enter your airspace? Obvious solution is to fly over the roads using sat nav technology. Get to the deliver address, then turn off the road over the addressee's land.

Why would you waste valuable battery power flying longer than you had to? I think the phrase is 'as the crow flies'.

Hmm. I'm going to go with "to avoid dicks making more claims against you for invading airspace they can't reach or use but which they are determined to claim is theirs".

More seriously, spend five minutes daydreaming about a world where everyone commuted in a personal drone. You couldn't realistically let everyone take a "crow flies" route, because it would be carnage. You'd have to channel the traffic and in the short term the obvious channels are the roads for which GPS based sat nav exists, and which a drone's sensor should be able to pick out as a check against a GPS position with relative ease. If there are only ever 20 drones flying over a city, then fine, you don't have a problem. But once traffic volumes pick up, you do. There may be other solutions but following the road network seems like the obvious off the shelf easy solution to get the whole thing running quickly.

[Cobnapint]

eccles said:

Whilst I agree with you about technology (remember the fuss when the first i-pad came out and now look at us!), the drone thing has a lot more pitfalls. Designing stuff like a phone for a human to use is relatively easy as we're all fairly similar, just look at the variations in house and garden design, people who live in flats. Some people have no gardens, some are sloping steeply, then add in the variables of the weather in this country. All this adds up to a vastly more complicated scenario for the drone to operate in. I'm not saying it will never happen, just not be universally used due to local limiting factors.

Agree with this. It's only going to work if you live no more than a limited distance from the distribution centre, have ordered a small item, live away from a town centre in a house with an acceptable landing area, you are definitely going to be 'in' when the drone arrives, and it's not yacking it down with rain or blowing a gale.

Of course, you're average white delivery van can carry dozens of packages at a time and can carry on delivering.
The drone has to return empty after every drop.

Conclusion = over blown publicity stunt.

[Thankyou4calling]

Cobnapint said:

Agree with this. It's only going to work if you live no more than a limited distance from the distribution centre, have ordered a small item, live away from a town centre in a house with an acceptable landing area, you are definitely going to be 'in' when the drone arrives, and it's not yacking it down with rain or blowing a gale.

Of course, you're average white delivery van can carry dozens of packages at a time and can carry on delivering.
The drone has to return empty after every drop.

Conclusion = over blown publicity stunt.

I'm staggered that what I thought were intelligent people are even thinking this is more than PR.

It's been around as clickbait for years and surfaces regularly.

Never gonna happen.

[LaurasOtherHalf]

Cobnapint said:

eccles said:

Whilst I agree with you about technology (remember the fuss when the first i-pad came out and now look at us!), the drone thing has a lot more pitfalls. Designing stuff like a phone for a human to use is relatively easy as we're all fairly similar, just look at the variations in house and garden design, people who live in flats. Some people have no gardens, some are sloping steeply, then add in the variables of the weather in this country. All this adds up to a vastly more complicated scenario for the drone to operate in. I'm not saying it will never happen, just not be universally used due to local limiting factors.

Agree with this. It's only going to work if you live no more than a limited distance from the distribution centre, have ordered a small item, live away from a town centre in a house with an acceptable landing area, you are definitely going to be 'in' when the drone arrives, and it's not yacking it down with rain or blowing a gale.

Of course, you're average white delivery van can carry dozens of packages at a time and can carry on delivering.
The drone has to return empty after every drop.

Conclusion = over blown publicity stunt.

One interesting point about the previous tech example is this;

When mobile phones first came out the average person couldn't see the point either as you quite correctly state. They were specific tools for specific reasons. Same with SMS text technology, then wap/mobile internet etc

The interesting thing is as the technology progressed, so did our understanding of it and its potential uses to the point where now people are using data for hundreds of tasks that no one really thought of. It's an entire technology built around something the pioneers first thought would be handy for taxi cab companies.

Now take that line of thinking to drones. It would be incredibly short sighted to think these will only ever be used to deliver small goods from Amazon. Yes this might be the experiment that drives the technology forward, but there are likely a million other uses they can come up with that we haven't thought of yet as the uses haven't evolved yet.

If they combine them with the biometrics software we have available now even more possibilities will be there, a drone that can look at your face and instantly recognise you

[footnote]

We used to have a waterways transport system but that went by the by when the roads and the mtor vehicle came.

The beauty of the roads system is that it combines goods transport with personal leisure use - so all us users pay for the upkeep of the system.

We could never really sustain a system of tens of thousands of drones flying over even just one London suburb. Amazon sending 10000 an hour out from their depot in Croydon, and newsagents at the end of every street sending out 100s a day with fags and booze. Plus all the other retailers - the sky would be thick with them - and that's just on a small scale.

Hub to hub won't work either - try getting 100 double beds on a drone to go from Crewe to Milton Keynes - or why bother - just use a truck or a plane.

Pie in the sky.

[jmorgan]

footnote said:

Pie in the sky.

Pies by drones? Now we are talking. Half time will never be the same again.

[SystemParanoia]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFQZgOttn-g

Intel collision avoidance in drones.
combine this with some rudimentary rerouting ai the will find the clearest airspace for a given route with the information it has and all is well. 4g/gsm data networks still work at 500ft so the ec2\aws servers can crunch this data for the drones effortlessly

[maffski]

Cobnapint said:

Of course, you're average white delivery van can carry dozens of packages at a time and can carry on delivering.
The drone has to return empty after every drop.

Conclusion = over blown publicity stunt.

Except all of the packages are being sent to different places - dragging a box around for 50 miles to deliver it somewhere 5 miles away isn't exactly cheap. Especially as you currently have to pay for a human being to carry it the last 10 feet.

A courier is going to be costing what, a couple of hundred quid a day to operate? That's a lot of drone miles.

Does it make sense in the short term? No. But this is a guy that's spent years building a rocket to send rich tourists to the edge of space. I don't think that's a short term investment either.

[crankedup]

Let's stick with what we have now, drones delivering packages from white vans.

[Cobnapint]

crankedup said:

Let's stick with what we have now, drones delivering packages from white vans.

Ooooosh.

[Gecko1978]

eccles said:

Gecko1978 said:

1990's

mobile phones we started to all get them with rise of pay as you go. So we all phone our friends from where ever to say "have a a new fangled cell phone"....2016 no one makes calls anymore we texts of message send a pic or update bookface. we can video call. We use the phone to access our bank online an pay for stuff it open the barriers on the tube, it scans bar codes, can be used to track other friends an family and is the font of all knowledge via google. We use it at the gym to check heart rate, record our work out. We listen to music on it etc etc.

1990's was not that long ago an we had no idea these things which we thought were cool because you could change the cover on it would actually become main life tool.

Drones are the same today a novelty 30 years from now you will wonder why we did not do it before.

Whilst I agree with you about technology (remember the fuss when the first i-pad came out and now look at us!), the drone thing has a lot more pitfalls. Designing stuff like a phone for a human to use is relatively easy as we're all fairly similar, just look at the variations in house and garden design, people who live in flats. Some people have no gardens, some are sloping steeply, then add in the variables of the weather in this country. All this adds up to a vastly more complicated scenario for the drone to operate in. I'm not saying it will never happen, just not be universally used due to local limiting factors.

I actually see the rise of Drones much like broadband roll out. Phones was perhaps a poor example beyond "look what they do now" angle. Superfast broadband was trialed by BT I think in a small coastal town in the south (I forget the name). Not in a big city or even part of a big city.

I see drones in the same way, I suspect a location will be choses like Miltom Keynes, and in miltion keynes it might only be a set area 3 miles around the warehouse with certain areas being no fly zones (schools, parks etc) and then in that area 300 homes who use Amazon prime will sign up and then of thoes 150 will be deemed suitible and a trial will happen.

Then another town an a bigger area, deliveries will just be during day light an home owner will have to be in etc. Basically on Day 1 it wont be efficent or much of a benefit but over time it will get better an better.

Some things will work some won't but in the end robots of some sort will bring you your goods and in the end we will like a phone wonder how we ever managed without them...like the phone it might just take 25 years is all.

[PoleDriver]

[anonymous-user]

Gecko1978 said:

I actually see the rise of Drones much like broadband roll out.

I won't hold my breath then. Max ADSL speed we get is 300kb/s 10 miles from Northampton!

[The Don of Croy]

Won't 3D printing tech overtake the need to deliver carp to your door? (Except for humungous refill cartridges and printheads, obvs.)

[jmorgan]

PoleDriver said:

Damn luddites and their forward thinking.

[eccles]

Gecko1978 said:

eccles said:

Gecko1978 said:

1990's

mobile phones we started to all get them with rise of pay as you go. So we all phone our friends from where ever to say "have a a new fangled cell phone"....2016 no one makes calls anymore we texts of message send a pic or update bookface. we can video call. We use the phone to access our bank online an pay for stuff it open the barriers on the tube, it scans bar codes, can be used to track other friends an family and is the font of all knowledge via google. We use it at the gym to check heart rate, record our work out. We listen to music on it etc etc.

1990's was not that long ago an we had no idea these things which we thought were cool because you could change the cover on it would actually become main life tool.

Drones are the same today a novelty 30 years from now you will wonder why we did not do it before.

Whilst I agree with you about technology (remember the fuss when the first i-pad came out and now look at us!), the drone thing has a lot more pitfalls. Designing stuff like a phone for a human to use is relatively easy as we're all fairly similar, just look at the variations in house and garden design, people who live in flats. Some people have no gardens, some are sloping steeply, then add in the variables of the weather in this country. All this adds up to a vastly more complicated scenario for the drone to operate in. I'm not saying it will never happen, just not be universally used due to local limiting factors.

I actually see the rise of Drones much like broadband roll out. Phones was perhaps a poor example beyond "look what they do now" angle. Superfast broadband was trialed by BT I think in a small coastal town in the south (I forget the name). Not in a big city or even part of a big city.

I see drones in the same way, I suspect a location will be choses like Miltom Keynes, and in miltion keynes it might only be a set area 3 miles around the warehouse with certain areas being no fly zones (schools, parks etc) and then in that area 300 homes who use Amazon prime will sign up and then of thoes 150 will be deemed suitible and a trial will happen.

Then another town an a bigger area, deliveries will just be during day light an home owner will have to be in etc. Basically on Day 1 it wont be efficent or much of a benefit but over time it will get better an better.

Some things will work some won't but in the end robots of some sort will bring you your goods and in the end we will like a phone wonder how we ever managed without them...like the phone it might just take 25 years is all.

At the moment we're just discussing Amazon using drones,imagine when every Tom, Dick and Harry retailer wants to start using them, the sky will be black with them. Also at the moment they're not particularly quiet and most have open rotors/propellers so you have the risk of your kid or pet running up to it and getting injured. Having said that, those problems should be pretty easy to solve. It will be the weather that will put the mockers on it in this country.
I would have thought the smart money would be on autonomous self driving electric vehicles delivering stuff to a locker attached to the outside of your building (kind of like your gas meter box). Much less weather dependent and probably easier to implement.

[jjlynn27]

Is rain a problem for drones? (genuine question).

[Bristol spark]

jjlynn27 said:

Is rain a problem for drones? (genuine question).

Must be easy enough to fit "windscreen wipers"?