Only one item can be delivered at a time. It can’t weigh more than 5 pounds. It can’t be too big. It can’t be something breakable, since the drone drops it from 12 feet. The drones can’t fly when it is too hot or too windy or too rainy.
You need to be home to put out the landing target and to make sure that a porch pirate doesn’t make off with your item or that it doesn’t roll into the street (which happened once to Lord and Silverman). But your car can’t be in the driveway. Letting the drone land in the backyard would avoid some of these problems, but not if there are trees.
Amazon has also warned customers that drone delivery is unavailable during periods of high demand for drone delivery.
As someone who frequently orders one can of soup, this is excellent news.
Dropping a can of soup 12ft onto a driveway seems bad for the can and for the driveway.
man killed by falling soup can which he ordered on Amazon
Reminds me of an insurance company that wanted to use drones to survey roof damage and in the long run they decided it was overall better to just use a camera on a long ass stick.
Just so you know, companies already use drones for roof surveys. I work for sunrun and we use them to analyze roofs for solar installations and whether roofs need to be fixed before hand.
Ok sure, there’s limitations. So what percentage of their current deliveries are actually possible with drones? If it’s above 0%, then there’s an opportunity.
Beyond that it’s a finance/ risk/ reward/ regulation issue.
Imagine a van which drives into a suburban housing estate and instead of parking individually at different houses for 5-10 mins each, spends less than 5 mins prepping a set of drones which take off from the roof of the van and return in minutes.
It saves time and fuel. It doesn’t work everywhere, but it doesn’t need to.
In fact it could be the same van. Do deliveries exactly as normal, and use a drone for the last half mile when convenient. It’s not either/or.
I remember people were hyped when they announced on Thanksgiving 2012 that drone delivery service was right around the corner. Brilliant marketing from them because people were hyped.
Turns out the FAA is that corner
I remember people being hyped about netting them or shooting them out of the sky.
I would like to take this time to thank the slow government FAA for preventing Amazon from clogging up the airspace with crappy drones and preventing a stupid system from taking off.
Aside from all the functional downsides, I’d expect these to go the way of Tesla when hitting a larger scale. Lawsuits and traffic incidents.
Great, it drops the package from 2 meters.
That’s an improvement over the delivery drivers that yeet my package over my fence
12 feet is more like 3.5-4
Just like plopping a grenade in a foxhole …
Noise is absolutely a concern for flying things. The reasons we don’t yet have flying cars is not because they’re too expensive, but because they’re too loud. And this is specifically why the FAA won’t let me commute to work in an ultralight.
The police want Bladerunner spinners so bad they can taste it. And the reason they can’t have them — or more helicopters — is the noise.
The average person can barely drive without murdering someone. Flying is even more complex than that, the noise is just a small problem compqred to that.
If I’m honest it really is not at all surprising.
I’m just sitting here thinking personal home delivery maybe isn’t the most sustainable thing in the world.
Perhaps we could invest the massive amounts of money that it takes to deliver goods to homes into better transit and post offices that don’t look like crap.
Welcome to the future
it’s just advertising it’s not really meant to be practical you’re advertising for them good job
I’m not sure how ‘Amazon failed at doing something they promised and ended up with a shitty result’ advertises them. That’s like saying telling people that McDonalds food is full of E. Coli is an advertisement for McDonalds.
they did this for the press. it was never a serious experiment.
I’m pretty sure they didn’t spend all this money to make stupidly unnecessary and difficult drone deliveries in a small town in Texas for the press since, again, that makes them look terrible.
And yet here we are talking about them. Whether or not its thru positive means, its online presence grew with this.
Who is going to be more likely to order from Amazon after reading that their drone delivery service is shit?
That’s how advertising works. You just try to get the name of a company out there as much as possible. It doesn’t have to be gold press to be effective. I mean we are talking about one of the most successful companies in human existence.
I really don’t understand why “Amazon sucks” is a successful advertising strategy for Amazon. Why don’t other companies use that strategy? Where is the Pepsi fucked up and put out a flavor that makes people vomit campaign that works because it gets Pepsi’s name out there?
It raises the question why a drone can’t deposit it lower than 12 feet. Is this drone theft control?
Probably loss of signal from GPS for one, and there are far more obstacles like power lines that can be hit below 12 feet.
Having built commerical drones, it’s mainly two things, obstacles and ground effect.
Maybe the end game is something far more sinister and this is a good way to iron out the bugs.
I get that this is probably more a learning experience than anything…butttt
The way the world is going and the conditions this thing needs to operate? Idk man
This service was announced more than a decade ago. If they’re still having learning experiences, I think they may be trying too hard to get this to work.
The program itself isn’t absurd, but Amazon is a bunch of fucking clowns. I only expect them to fail in the world of logistics. But they’re so big & everybody keeps giving them their money, they can do whatever they want, poorly, forever. They fail ‘up’.
Drone delivery is indeed part of the future of logistics. They just need to make the drones more robust to handle slightly bigger, heavier loads, like at least 10# would be great & a reasonable goal. Arm it with AI so it knows where to drop the payload. Etc etc. There are indeed a number of kinks to be worked out…and who better to crash & burn, learn on than Amazon? 🤡
I live on the 10th story of an apartment building. Where does the drone deliver my 10 pound load to?
I live in a duplex with a front yard that’s about two square feet between the front stoop and the sidewalk. Where does the drone deliver my 10 pound load to?
I live in a house surrounded by a lot of trees. Where does the drone deliver my 10 pound load to?
I have an enclosed front porch, inside of which deliveries can safely be left without worrying about them being stolen. Where does the drone deliver my 10 pound load to?
Drone delivery to someone’s home might be useful for a small number of people in specific circumstances. Most circumstances would be far more efficient if done by a human.
What does this actually solve?
In Germany we have a trial run of food delivery. A drone will bring a package with up to 4.5 kg to a “remote” village, then some students on e-bikes will bring it to the houses. Why they are using drones instead of one lorry a day is unknown.
I’ve seen videos of a firm doing interesting stuff with bigger “mothership” drones that hover much higher and then lower a much smaller drone like thing on a cable to place the parcel on the ground. They can hit pretty precise targets and can maneuver around more obstacles than bigger drones can.
All that needs to happen is for the tech to advance to the point where it’s cheaper to do x% of their deliveries via automated drones than it would cost to have delivery drivers do it and they’ll start doing it. Saving millions(billions?) by say halving the number of human operated delivery trucks will make it a no brainer for them.
