My rural UPS guy variously rings the doorbell, leaves the package in the garage or even puts it in the back seat of a car parked in the driveway. I'm grateful for all these attempts; it keeps my packages out of the weather etc and is far better than a note on the door.

A drone can do none of these things. Perhaps if I had a 'drop box' the drone could drop the package in, with a ramp top that slid the package into a weather-resistant interior (like a public post office letter drop box - anybody remember those?) it could work.

So I imagine drone delivery will be initially restricted to registered clients (commercial/industrial) with special installed receiver boxes. Not a small win - many package deliveries are to commercial customers!

I've always thought that standardized drone landing pads are the obvious and inevitable solution. For commercial addresses with a flat roof, this is rather easy. For many residential addresses it may be a little trickier. Most houses probably don't have a weather-proof area that doesn't require some machinery (e.g. a conveyor belt to move a landed package into a garage) or a tricky drone landing (e.g. a covered back porch).

A 'drop box' near the curb by the mailbox may be an acceptable solution.

I like your imagined scenario very much! It can be, essentially, a "helipad" designed for a drone landing and a "chute" to an interior staging area for sorting and whatnot. That post office letter drop box is a really functional and cool example.

As you pointed out, there are numerous avenues for customer support (putting the package in the garage without explicit instruction) that can be hashed out in the agreement between commercial customer and the delivery platform. It also could help with building a relationship and sharing liability in some ways.

In a commercial setting, the box could be on a roof with a chute to the mail room. No reason for it to be exposed in public that way.

Good news Edna, your new walker just arrived. The bad news is that there was a mix-up with the delivery instructions and you have to climb up to the roof to get it.

Sorry, we can't send someone out because we don't employ people. You are talking to a machine right now. The best we can do is have you put an order in to ship yourself to the roof of your house. We can then send our xl-drone to deliver you up there.

Yeah that's kind of what I meant, sorry if not clear. What I meant by liability is that if the product delivery has a hiccup, it's sort of a shared understanding that the system should work 90%+ of the time, but when it doesn't, well, it happens.

And you need a drone dog to attack the drone mailman. One which has a premium jump package installed. It's still not as satisfying as hearing the screams following the barking. The world is changing so fast.

On the other hand, a drone could get to you where you are right now. Enable the app on your phone and the drone will show up right outside. No need to give a street address at all. Just the city.

If you're willing to stand outside in the street for, oh, any time between 8AM and noon? Package delivery is notoriously annoying already. Drones that require in-person acceptance outside your building are not helping. Its a problem that needs solving, before drones can deliver anything.

Automation of individual package deliveries can remove exactly that problem.

Your phone pings you and drone says "We agreed 3pm. That's 5 minutes from now. Still good? (Yes/No). Yes. (4 mins 45 seconds later) drone says: "I'm waiting for you outside. Can you come out to meet me?"

Alternatively, invert the waiting process. Amazon agrees to a 24-hour period starting tomorrow during which I can demand a 15-minute delivery by pressing a button. For very high-volume items this period could be indefinite.

It remains to be seen if this is economically feasible and if we can tolerate hundreds or thousand of these things buzzing around. But you won't be waiting for the man all day.

Couldn't they just use weather proof packaging instead?

They could.

But one of the bad side effects of "free" delivery is a race to the bottom in quality. My neighborhood UPS guy is awesome -- he rings the doorbell, if it's raining he puts a bag around each box, if a box is heavy he'll bring it inside for my wife. The local Lasership folks (different ones every time) are far less awesome -- they just drop the box on the porch, not bothering to ring the doorbell, not bothering with weatherproofing. So we've had a couple of boxes soaked, even when my wife was home, because she didn't hear the delivery.

I'd pay a couple bucks more to get UPS over Lasership, but it's not easy for me to select that option with most web merchants.

Is there no such thing as "signed delivery" there? Almost every single thing I've ordered online where I live (South Africa), was delivered in-person. They would not leave the package until it's been signed for. If you're not there and there is no one else to sign for it, they will take it to the post-office for you to collect. And yes, this happens even with "free-delivery" online stores.

Heck, sometimes when import duties had to be paid upon delivery, they would stay upwards of 20+ minutes while I went to a nearby ATM. In those cases, they could just as easily have taken the package to the local post-office for collection.

It's up to the seller. If they insist on a signature then the delivery won't happen without one. But that doesn't happen much in my (nice, suburban, US) neighborhood. I guess package theft is rare enough that the extra cost of requiring a signature outweighs the extra risk of not.

I'm in SF and Amazon packages use Ontrac. Ontrac appears to use contractors that just have a sticker on the side of their car with the logo. In the last month alone I've had them forge multiple signatures + report a package as delivered when I've been home all day and nothing arrived. And other times they throw it a decent distance or put it in front and it's stolen within five minutes.

Amazon re-ships via UPS/other and it arrives acceptably. The worst UPS has done is not knock/ring and that's rare.

90%+ of my packages via Ontrac had forged signatures, misreported delivery statuses, not actually arriving, [...]

Folks probably aren't making drone-ready packages at this time. Have to deliver whatever goes on the truck.

Anyway the drop box idea is a way of securing the package vs just leaving it in the parking lot or whatever. A drone sure can't knock on the door and hand it over.

I am worried about the coming dronepocalypse.

Enjoy your clear skies while you can. When no-name manufacturers can make cheap drones which can be launched by anonymous malicious people to e.g. drop bombs on Times Square, there is no accountability. How will our systems cope with that? For the first time we'll have autonomous, cheaply made robots among us. (Self-driving cars, by contrast, are not cheap to make.)

And even without malicious intent, there will always be a 1% chance that some big drone will drop on people's heads ...

> When no-name manufacturers can make cheap drones which can be launched by anonymous malicious people to e.g. drop bombs on Times Square, there is no accountability.

How is this any different than buying a model RC plane? Many high end planes have GPS on board and with some modifications, can be made to fly from way point to way point. RC planes can also get to higher air speeds than a quadcopter.

A remote-controlled plane still needs someone to control it. A programmable robot does not.

Doesn't drone refer to an unmanned vehicle?

These vehicles only need the software to be unmanned. Local laws may require these vehicles to be manned. The definition still doesn't fit.

> While a diesel truck costs $1 per mile in fuel and maintenance, Burns said an electric truck costs about 30 cents per mile and drones only 2 cents per mile.

> It can travel up to 50 mph. The drone’s battery allows flights up to 30 minutes and recharges atop the delivery truck.

The difference between diesel and electric is huge, but saving money gets trickier going from electric to drone. The drone can travel 30 minutes, and needs X time to recharge and reload with packages. Adding a skill to an already hectic driving job might require better pay to get people who can earn their drone wings.

The systems will improve. Battery power will improve. Software will improve to make the entire system more efficient. Permanent infrastructure (drone hubs?) may lessen the need for launch vehicles. Launch vehicles will eventually be self driving. I want my new drone to be delivered by a drone flying vehicle which was driven into range by a drone truck. All of which were built by drones. Drones all the way down.

> Doesn't drone refer to an unmanned vehicle?

> These vehicles only need the software to be unmanned. Local laws may require these vehicles to be manned. The definition still doesn't fit.

"Unmanned" means there is no human on board the vehicle, not that no human is piloting the vehicle. Autonomous flight is a common feature of consumer drones (and some military drones), but it isn't implies by the terms "drone" or "UAV."

You know that is an interesting idea, drones for "last mile" of delivery into standardized dropboxes.

Imagine USPS pulling up to a street but never getting out of the truck, instead launching two dozen drones which deliver the local mail and small parcels and then all come back to the truck 10 minutes later. Super recharge and move to next street.

What's with package delivery companies and branding?

First UPS did "What Can Brown Do for You?"

Now Workhorse is going to send over a giant Horsefly.