>It's all well and good for the unmanned vehicles to fly to a particular GPS site, but how does it then find the package's intended recipient?
The drones could be almost fully automated - fly to this GPS point above the person's house, at which point control is handed to a pilot for the landing & package drop.
>How is the transfer of the package enacted? What stops someone else stealing the package along the way?
I'd imagine the same way it's done today, the same way USPS/UPS handles packages - by dropping them on my porch and hoping my neighbors are honest.
>And what happens when next door's kid decides to shoot the drone with his BB rifle?
He gets a spanking and the drone gets repaired? The same thing that would happen if he shot the tires off the Fedex truck?
This article raises some good points about the political ramifications of drone technology, and some excellent ones about it being a PR move to squelch negative reporting, but I'm left with the feeling that, if he were alive a century ago, James Ball wouldn't be out of place writing an article titled "Sears & Roebuck to stop horse-drawn carriage delivery in favor of the automobile? Don't believe the hype".
> The drones could be almost fully automated - fly to this GPS point above the person's house, at which point control is handed to a pilot for the landing & package drop
In the real world, you can't "fly to this GPS point". If this were possible, we would have automated airplanes and pilots would be out of their jobs. Remember the real world has other aircraft and a number of interesting obstacles: power lines, lamp posts, fences, trees, cranes, trucks, chimneys, kites and all other kinds of interesting stuff.
Flying blind to a preprogrammed GPS location is simply impossible in the real world.
Also, remember that GPS isn't quite enough to drop a package right on your doorstep. You need much more than that.
>Flying blind to a preprogrammed GPS location is simply impossible in the real world.
I didn't intend to rule out the need for clever self-flying technology on the part of Amazon.
But comparing the challenges that face an airplane that carries people at very high speeds and altitudes to a low altitude slow-moving drone is pretty silly.
Google's self driving car does this at road speed limits. There's no reason a drone doing 20 MPH with an extra degree of freedom couldn't do it as well.
>Also, remember that GPS isn't quite enough to drop a package right on your doorstep. You need much more than that.
>> at which point control is handed to a pilot for the landing & package drop
Well, if we assume that the drone is pilotless up to the point when the drone needs to land:
* the drone flies to the GPS point in question and hovers pending instruction
* the drone takes a picture of the ground area and sends it via 4G to a controller
* the controller identifies a landing point and transmits it back to the drone
* the drone uses its obstacle avoidance systems to land, drop the package, and take back off for a return to Amazon's center.
This is just one idea. Perhaps Amazon provides you with a beacon for the drone, or you get a big QR code for the drone to target your house & they don't need pilots at all. Who knows!
Either way, it seems to me that the most interesting thing would be the collision avoidance systems for automated flight. But considering Google can do this with a car on highways, I'd imagine that a slow moving drone that can also operate along the Z axis would be easier.
> Flying military drones is a very complicated matter.
I'm sure it is - but military drones have an incredibly different mission; comparing them to a slow package delivery drone isn't really worthwhile. Hell, according to Wiki the Predator drone's stall speed is 60 mph - Amazon drones sound like they will be much slower, at least at first.
Yes, my point was that such a device is going to be relatively easy to fly remotely even over a balky, high-latency connection. (Except perhaps in high winds, but high winds are likely to ground these things anyway.)
No, air traffic is not 'almost automated', and pilots are not 'just there as a safety backup'. The only part of flying that has been automated is avionics, ie: taking off, flying the aircraft along a pre-set flight path, and landing it. While this may seem this is 'all you need to automate away pilots', it completely ignores these nasty few percent of tail risk where things turn out not to follow the exact preconditions at the time of the flight plan. Like weather, technical problems (in the plane or on the ground), delays, airspace congestion, diversions, whatever. In each and every one of such cases it's still the pilot that has to decide how to handle the situation and either fly the plane itself, or reprogram the autopilot.
People always seem to think planes fly 'autonomously', but they don't. They can fly 'automatic' maybe 90% of the time, but they don't fly themselves.
>In each and every one of such cases it's still the pilot that has to decide how to handle the situation and either fly the plane itself, or reprogram the autopilot.
So far I've heard these drones won't work because existing aircraft can't do this, or because military drones can't do that.
But no one seems to consider that these drones don't fulfill the same role as a Predator drone or a jumbo jet, so many of these objections are incredibly odd.
I remember seeing a link on HN several weeks ago about a flying robot that was designed to bump into walls and reorient itself. What if we had an army of package delivering robots that flew at 5 MPH, did best-case collision avoidance, and if they bumped into the side of a brick wall it's not a huge deal?
If an Amazon drone runs into bad weather it could be programmed to land on the nearest flat roof. If unexpected airspace congestion is detected it could just turn back to home. Or hover in place until things resolve. Or(...)
We aren't trying to safely land an airplane full of humans at 100 knots, or deliver a Hellfire missile on a moving target. We are flying a lightweight, slow moving drone with a tiny package. The considerations are completely different.
>> So far I've heard these drones won't work because existing aircraft can't do this, or because military drones can't do that.
That's not the reason why I think this Amazon drone thing is just a way to generate some media hype, I can think of many other reasons why the idea is silly and won't work. You can find most if not all of them in other peoples posts in the various Amazon drone articles, I don't have to list them here.
My main point was not that delivery drones are impossible because planes or military drones still need pilots, I just wanted to point out that 'self-flying planes' are so often used as proof for other types of autonomous vehicles, which is based on the false premise that planes are autonomous.
90% is probably good enough for Amazon package delivery. The other 10% they send out another one. The cost of this is included in the fast-delivery surcharge. Unique and living products are not eligible for air delivery.
Devices that do this already exist and have done since 1983: Tomahawk cruise missiles. Huge areas of military technology have been developed for precisely delivering explosives; now they are being repurposed for non-harmful use.
GPS is certainly enough to fly it to the visual vicinity of your house. I can imagine needing to supply a landing marker (large QR code?) to tell it exactly where to land.
A QR code is a nice idea. Another solution could be to take a picture or a short video of the place you want the drone to leave the package. Machine vision technology is easily sophisticated enough to translate this into an accurate 3D model which could be correlated with known GPS information.
This kind of process will probably happening anyway for hazard avoidance.
It's pretty easy for a drone to fly higher than almost all the obstacles you just listed. Skyscrapers and smokestacks are going to be a concern, but those don't move and it's easy to do offline route planning to avoid those. Construction cranes and other temporary obstacles are a problem, but some rudimentary sensing and fallback to human control should solve that.
As someone who makes delivery robots for hospitals, let me say that I envy navigation problems of flying drones. I'd seriously worry about power and range and weather and how you recover a drone that has a problem and crashes, but not navigation in general.
Amazon doesn't need this to use drones for 100% of deliveries. But if they pick enough constraints, could it work?
Assume it will never work in NYC, but could it work in Albuquerque, New Mexico? Assume it won't fly if the winds are over mph. Assume that only human operated landings are performed the first time to scope the landing zone, with future approach and landings to be automated. Assume that anything unexpected causes the delivery to get canceled.
In the 60 Minutes interview, Bezos was optimistic but more cautious about when it would be ready -- more like 2018+. Also, the earlier part of the segment was about how it took Amazon Fresh 5 years to expand grocery delivery to its second city. Bezos, of all tech companies, knows the value of staying with a problem for the long term. If I had to bet if Amazon could figure this out over the next 50 years, I would say yes. Sooner is a bonus.
>In the real world, you can't "fly to this GPS point". If this were possible, we would have automated airplanes and pilots would be out of their jobs.
These things don't follow. We actually do have automated airplanes and pilots jobs are really just there for passenger comfort, but that is because Autoland and autopilot utilize ILS' and other sensor data besides GPS to make it precise enough.
So while your point about GPS alone being insufficient for precision delivery is correct, the overall thought that we can't do precision delivery is misguided.
While it is hard, impossible is a stretch. You can buy drones with autopilot that will land at a point as long as you have 10 ft of clear space. A friend yesterday was using one he'd received for $3000 to film some cliff tops while we were walking the edge. After shutting off the remote it can fly back to where it was turned on so you don't have to carry it. Bear in mind this is with tech that's a few years old.
Yes, as long as there isn't a crane, net, tilted lamppost, kite, human, dog, or any other unplanned obstacle.
Come on, people. Being able to draw a trajectory isn't the same as moving a physical object through space. And moving a drone to a predetermined GPS location in ideal conditions while you are watching it and when you know there is nothing around has nothing to do with day-to-day deliveries using drones.
So you believe sensor based obstacle avoidance is an impossible problem in robotics? Second, unrelated question, do you think drones need to complete 100% of their scheduled tasks or do you think it's acceptable to fail a small fraction of the time?
I know, but with the Raspberry Pi's and similar tech we can't be that far away from something that's technically feasible. We also don't know what Amazon has been working on behind closed doors. They are known for vast technical prowess after all.
I would disagree with it being impossible, especially in the drone delivery business. Definitely hard but not impossible.
The drone leave a known location to go to another location using a direct path. It is a point A to point B algorithm. Amazon could build or use a database of information regarding obstacles and traffic, to program and test well ahead of time destination between A (the warehouse) to B (i.e. every doorstep in a 30 minutes radius) and back to A.
GPS is often accurate within 1 meter which should be enough for door delivery (http://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/performance/accuracy/histogra...).
I agree that humans will be involved in monitoring the drones 24/7.
> I'd imagine the same way it's done today, the same way USPS/UPS handles packages - by dropping them on my porch and hoping my neighbors are honest.
These drones have a 10 miles range, I would guess they are intended for densely populated metropolitan areas where it is viable to have a closeby Amazon warehouse. So in most cases simply there is no porch.
From careful research (watching Friends and How I Met Your Mother) I've learned that all New Yorkers have access to a romantic roof-space. That would be a rather superior alternative to porches.
Which does make me wonder how much better this plan would be than using, say, motorcycle couriers.
If the story had been - 'Amazon to deploy motor bikes to deliver packages within 10 miles of their distribution centre' it'd have received a lot less attention.
Packages are routinely delivered quickly, accurately, securely and cheaply in urban areas. I do think Amazon are solving a problem that doesn't exist. Nice bit of PR though.
Motorcycle couriers are comparatively very expensive - a 10 mile delivery is easily half an hour of real human time (plus gas, wear, etc). It might be "cheap" if they're delivering $50 of (high margin) pizza, but less so if they're delivering a single book. That's the problem they're trying to solve - delivering small items quickly and cheaply.
You can hit most of a medium-sized metro area from a 10-mile radius. NYC and cities like it are exceptional; most metros have an abundance of single-family homes with porches and backyards, even just a mile or so from the central business district.
Amazon would not need a full-fledged distribution center as a drone base. Orders received by, say, 10am could be put on a truck from a distribution center that's an hour or two's drive from the center of the metro area. The truck goes to the drone base in the middle of town and unloads. You can still deliver before 5pm.
Having a drone drop my package on my fire escape would be far better than dropping it on the street. Lots of New Yorkers have trouble getting packages (well, those not rich enough for doormen). Being able to specify a dropoff point would be fantastic. Shit, I'll build a little drone landing pad if I have to.
Alternative proposal: take the package to the customer's phone. At this sort of timing, "where I am now" is better than "where I usually am".
The customer must have a smartphone and place the order with Amazon's special app. The app then continually uploads the customer's gps data to Amazon so the drone can target. Once the drone gets close, the phone also gives a distinctive beacon using wifi for the drone to hone in on. When it's time to receive the package, the app displays a specific QR code and the drone scans it.
It's the customer's responsibility to be outside at the right time, but the app will tell them when to within a few minutes. Likewise, if the phone's battery dies during delivery, the delivery is aborted for a partial refund (the app provides warnings).
Some people will worry about accruing "failure to receive" charges due to Amazon's failings, but once a good track record is established, that will fade. Others will worry about the NSA seizing all that location data, but they already have it from the cell phone companies.
> "... by dropping them on my porch and hoping my neighbors are honest."
You wouldn't even need to do this. If you have a garden (even a communal one) then the drone could simply land there instead. Or perhaps a balcony, if large enough. I can imagine Amazon sending you a beacon of some kind which the drone could communicate with when nearby to pinpoint where it's supposed to land.
>So now you have to put a camera and a remote control system with a range of many miles on the drone. And it can only work if there's a line of sight.
Pack it in, boys. Until someone develops some sort of wireless technology which we could use to receive information from the drone as well as control it, and deploys it widely across high population-density areas, this drone idea just won't be feasible.
I've never researched the exact technology behind military drones but my understanding is they are capable of everything you mentioned being not yet possible.
I just can't wrap my head around how these are possible in areas like Manhattan where they would be most useful. Not to mention 4 or 5 years is probably about the understatement of the century as to when it will be permitted by the FAA.
The power requirements for a camera and a cell connection are pretty small compared to what it takes to keep that thing in the air. I mean, your phone can go for a full day with it's tiny little battery, and it even has that big power sucking screen to drive too.
>You didn't address the weight and the power requirements for it.
Likely nominal. Considering the drone probably has a camera already for routine (non-piloted operations) weight wouldn't be significant. Power wouldn't be huge as wireless service wouldn't be required until the drone is ready to land. Besides, this isn't a long-flight drone.
>The range of the drones is already horrible.
The range of the drones is likely driven by business, not technology. I'm sure if Amazon is serious about this program they've selected a 10 mile radius from their processing centers as a way to control costs & give the drone high operating time margins. If they do it, and it works, I wouldn't be surprised to see larger runs in the future.
>The costs of controlling drones over the wireless networks would be pretty high too.
I can't speak to that directly, but don't forget Amazon already subsidizes wireless costs with Whispernet on the Kindle, so I wouldn't be surprised if they've got some good agreements with wireless networks already. Of course the data needs for video is much greater than for sending an ebook, but this is a lower-volume proposition, both in actual wireless use time & customer count.
The drones could be almost fully automated - fly to this GPS point above the person's house, at which point control is handed to a pilot for the landing & package drop.
>How is the transfer of the package enacted? What stops someone else stealing the package along the way?
I'd imagine the same way it's done today, the same way USPS/UPS handles packages - by dropping them on my porch and hoping my neighbors are honest.
>And what happens when next door's kid decides to shoot the drone with his BB rifle?
He gets a spanking and the drone gets repaired? The same thing that would happen if he shot the tires off the Fedex truck?
This article raises some good points about the political ramifications of drone technology, and some excellent ones about it being a PR move to squelch negative reporting, but I'm left with the feeling that, if he were alive a century ago, James Ball wouldn't be out of place writing an article titled "Sears & Roebuck to stop horse-drawn carriage delivery in favor of the automobile? Don't believe the hype".