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Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design
- eclipxe 11y agoI like the placards placed in "safe landing zones". Simple solution to hard problem.
- varelse 11y agoAnd mess with your neighbor's life by placing your own landing placards in your fenced-off backyard.
- vektyr 11y agoI assume that could be prevented by using QR codes or something.
- scott_karana 11y agoThis fails if: 1) If you can see over the fence... 2) If it shows up in Google Maps ;) #2 might be implausible now, but if people get really accustomed to this, I guarantee that some handymen are going to tile/spraypaint large, permanent drop points in their yards.
- takeda 11y agoYeah, wouldn't be better to have one that has encoded QR code with the package information?
- btgeekboy 11y agoHow does this "mess with your neighbor's life"? I wouldn't see this being a huge concern unless you happened to place 4 or 5 orders a day.
- dangson 11y agoI think the poster was implying that you trick the drone into delivering your neighbor's package into your backyard by putting the card out even when you're not expecting a delivery.
- bigiain 11y agoGPS is way more than accurate enough to discriminate between your backyard and you neighbours. Even with poor satellite geometry I rarely see more than 1 or 2 meter CEP when I'm up above the tree/building line.
- jaxomlotus 11y agoI'm betting that by the time this is real (and assuming the shown implementation is what actually goes live), everyone will have their own personal QR code so there will be no mistakes.
- toyg 11y agoTake a pic of your neighbour's QR, print a copy, profit.
- shpx 11y agoWait 40 minutes, don't get package, email support, they review footage/delivery data, see drone going to your neighbor, press charges for petty theft.
- varelse 11y agoDid I say anything about keeping or even opening the packages? If the drone is using some sort of convnet or HOG to detect the landing pad, I can only imagine hilarity would ensue if its visual field were saturated with multiple copies of the target image, a sort of visual DDoS if you will...
- icebraining 11y agoYeah. And even for apartments, you could use window support brackets (like those used to hang AC units, but removable).
- mentos 11y agoI remember when Amazon first announced the idea two years ago there was a lot of brainstorming in the hn comments and that idea was pretty popular. No idea if it influenced Amazon but would be cool if so. *found the thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6833223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6833223 "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!" -owenmarshall
- pinkunicorn 11y agoShit, I thought this was a marketing gimmick. Looks like they might actually be delivering. And it looks quite awesome to be honest. And development in Israel? Wow!
- mayneack 11y agoIt still could be. They did it right after thanksgiving last time too.
- kzhahou 11y agoYup, right before Cyber Monday.
- babuskov 11y agoI don't get it. What so special about development in Israel?
- PopePompous 11y agoThat means they'll have onboard countermeasures for surface-to-air missiles.
- milesf 11y agoLove that they got Jeremy Clarkson from Top Gear fame to do the video. I'm guessing he likely had a hand in writing the copy as well.
- sixQuarks 11y agoIs it just me, or is Jeremy Clarkson's voice off by a few milliseconds in the video?
- darawk 11y agoYa, I noticed that as well. Very irritating. The service looks awesome if they can, uh, deliver though.
- coderdude 11y ago"Jeff Bezos beats DoD at it's own game" -Business Insider
- serge2k 11y agoDrone delivery without explosions.
- listic 11y agoI wonder how can delivery with drones be more economically effective than with cars and drivers, with "distances of 10 miles or more"? Which, if I'm not mistaken, still somewhat exceeds capabilities of today's drones.
- brianwawok 11y agoPeople are expensive.
- ghaff 11y agoThey're not that expensive and are very flexible dealing with the very analog common-sense-requiring situation that is dropping off a package.
- giarc 11y agoThey are much, much more expensive then drones. Minimum wage, benefits, delivery vehicle maintenance, insurance, etc etc etc.
- ghaff 11y agoYes, people are more expensive. In that they're paid wages. Others things you list are common to automated platforms. But people are also good in dealing with imprecise situations that are common with package delivery. I actually believe Amazon is seriously interested in pursuing this. I also believe it's largely stupid.
- giarc 11y agoDo you know why medic-vac helicopters exist? Not necessarily because they move faster than an ambulance, but because they can travel as the crow flies. Even if a drone and a human delivery driver cost the same, a human could never come close to the delivery speed of a drone simply because they can fly over stop signs, stop lights, inefficient road design and get to the home the fastest. And for Amazon, that is the value, getting the package to the customer as quick as possible.
- josephpmay 11y agoI have trouble understanding where the package goes in the drones (which I guess is good for deterring theft). Also, they don't really provide any scale, but the drones appear to be pretty huge.
- pcl 11y agoFor scale reference: towards the end of the first video [1], they show the drone landing on a pad next to a fence, and a few seconds later, a woman picks up the box and pad. I'd say it's about 6 feet on a side, and maybe 4 feet tall. [1] https://youtu.be/MXo_d6tNWuY?t=107 https://youtu.be/MXo_d6tNWuY?t=107
- i1626462 11y agoThe drone looks like it's roughly 2.5m wide and 2m long
- narrator 11y agoProbably won't be able to deliver in bad weather. Small aircraft aviation is always subject to the whims of the weather.
- petersouth 11y agoI think there's gonna be alot of teenage pranks and destruction. People setting the landing spot in the water or people stealing them with nets. Not sure if much recourse unless there camera footage or gps locator.
- pmoriarty 11y agoYeah, I have a feeling there's going to be a lot of drone hunting going on, until Amazon figures out a way to secure these things.
- smackfu 11y agoOTOH, I feel like if people today proposed that trucks leave unattended packages outside people's door, it would be dismissed as unworkable. But it happens constantly with minimal problems. There aren't as many bad people in the world as some people think.
- pmorici 11y agoI've got a 100% theft rate for unattended packages in the past 90 days.
- vectorjohn 11y agoThank you captain anecdote.
- pmorici 11y agoThe OP must not live in a city. Package theft is a cottage industry.
- igammarays 11y agoThis is the standard fear response to new technologies. Uber: how can you get in a car with a stranger? Airbnb: Even Paul Graham said "are you nuts?". Self driving cars: but what if people take advantage of it's collision avoidance abilities to walk in front? etc. etc. The fact is, most people are not malicious, life goes on anyway, and the risk of vandalism is quantifiable and included in the cost of doing business. And in this case vandals can easily be prosecuted, since a drone is already hooked up with remote control, GPS tracking, cameras and monitoring.
- mapt 11y agoHere's what I think is more likely: A small regional airport is taken over by Amazon. They build hangars and warehouses onsite. It's ramped up to land and fly a big turbine-powered mothership every five minutes. The warehouse dispatches packages to stacks of delivery drones like the one pictured in the video. The mothership loads the delivery drones in order. The motherships take off regularly, and then as the mothership flies near the target swath, the drones are released one by one and glide to the target zone efficiently before doing a vertical landing. Empty, they return autonomously to a small recovery facility in a vacant lot somewhere within ~5km. They're packed into a pickup or a semi and returned to the airfield in stacks. ------ Why? Because VTOL flight is not easy to do at long ranges; Batteries generally limit that to 10-30 minutes since vehicle mass fraction is large. Because very small planes are only a small multiple (2-5x) more efficient than VTOL flight. Because high speeds are something vehicles like this are not great at. A drone like this doesn't have a great straight-line range when you sling a heavy load under it; Amazon is not going to erect sizable warehouses within ~5km of every plausible delivery. Their stock is too large, and too sparsely ordered. -------- Or, even more likely? Replace the flying mothership with a box truck dispenser. The driver stops at his target neighborhood, sends the drones out, they deliver autonomously, takes the drones back in 10 minutes later, and returns to regional warehouse in the next 20-50 minutes of driving, for 30 to 60 minute delivery. Amazon gets to deliver to a neighborhood rather than to a house.
- blazespin 11y agoI agree with the last one, but ground delivery robots would make way more sense. I don't know about 30-60 minutes, however. The soccer shoe emergency can't really be that big of a market. Emergency medicine by drone delivery I get, but the reason people go shopping nowadays is either grocery or an excuse to get out of the house. Drones are never going to eliminate the excuse to get out of the house factor.
- avar 11y agoToday's soccer shoe emergency is tomorrow's normal turnaround. Imagine trying to explain to someone living in the 90s that they just have to watch this one TV show right now. Surely they could just walk down to their local video rental store, not that many people really need to watch something right now! But once something like BitTorrent & Netflix happens it becomes the new expectation. I think something like drone delivery or delivery via autonomous vehicles is going to similarly change the market for the delivery of physical goods.
- ChuckMcM 11y agoWhile I find the technology impressive, it makes me wonder if "Black Friday" is going to look like the Blitz, a low hum and looking up, wave after wave of aircraft coming over the city looking for the right place to drop their payload ...
- pmoriarty 11y agoDirect links to the videos: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/112715/download/PrimeAirVideo01.zip https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/112715/d... https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/112715/download/PrimeAirVideo02.zip https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/112715/d...
- logicallee 11y agopeople in the 60's thought we would have flying cars in the 21st century. in reality we'll never need to go anywhere anymore, not for work, not for meetings, not for a movie, and not for groceries. what's a city for anyway? Oh, nightclubs I guess...
- zeisss 11y agoso, assuming this works: Won't they get a lot of problems with wind / bad weather regions? I guess they won't be happy if they can do this only half of a year, and the other half the drones are sitting around. So, if this takes off (phun intended) will Amazon try weather control next?
- ck2 11y agoThey are going to have to go back and update all the movies that attempt to guess the future. Apparently there are going to be a bunch of drones flying around delivering to people in the suburbs. Looks very cool but in the real world so many things can go wrong, I am sure people are going to intercept and either damage or steal the drones.
- hiddencost 11y agoHaha. You must live somewhere pretty crazy if you expect that much violence and theft. People don't randomly attack everything. Sure, there'll be some losses, but that's true of any business, plus you'll have the theft on camera and just stop delivering to those neighborhoods. Compare the cost of drone loss to UPS' cost due to accidents. It would take an insane amount of effort to steal that many drones.
- ck2 11y agoYes I live in a low-incoming neighborhood and everything gets destroyed by unsupervised kids and teenagers that run around after school before parents get home (and some even after parents are home). But I also live near college student housing and they pretty much do something similar with their drinking and partying. Just like UPS cannot leave packages for me here, I couldn't get drone delivery either. Not everyone can afford or wants to live in suburbs.
- TheCoelacanth 11y agoLow income areas also conveniently (for Amazon) have lower amounts of money to spend, so they are a much less desirable location to provide a service like this. They wouldn't have to provide this service everywhere for it to make sense to do it in some places.
- krschultz 11y agoCue Amazon's PR firm trying to win 'cyber-monday'. Whether or not Amazon ever delivers packages with drones, the ROI on the drone R&D is massive simply based on how much attention it draws each year on cyber monday.
- SwellJoe 11y agoAmazon is such an interesting company to watch. They do really dumb and goofy stuff, all the time, in very visible ways, but under the radar they've got the largest cloud hosting business in the world chugging along devouring everything in its path that most people don't even know about. I mean, none of my non-technical friends know AWS exists or what it is, and few realize Amazon is one of the most powerful and influential tech companies in the world. This drone stuff even feels like a distraction so that nobody notices what Amazon is actually up to. It's currently so far from useful, but it does generate a lot of PR for Amazon, and the timing is not at all subtle.
- edgall 11y agoIt's almost Christmas so it means another video from Amazon on their futuristic drone tech. Sigh. Most news stations in every country will probably tag this to the end of their broadcasts thus meaning millions saved in advertising for Amazon.
- Chathamization 11y agoI like the way they make it sound like the only thing stopping drone delivery is government regulations: > We will deploy when and where we have the regulatory support needed to safely realize our vision.
- anon4this1 11y agoDoes anyone else think that underground tunnels are a superior way to solve the last few miles problem? Tunnels about 1 foot in diameter with little wheeled vehicles pushing around payloads of takeaway food, groceries , parcels at reasonable speed with control computers determining routing and stopping collisions. A functioning network of this type would be more valuable than power or cable utility networks, and horizontal tunnel drilling tech means that you dont have to dig up huge swathes of road to put tunnels in.
- axiak 11y agoMore likely than not, these drones are for the rural last mile problem, where drivers aren't worth the cost. In that case tunnels wouldn't be worth the cost.
- ghaff 11y agoIt's most likely the last 20 miles problem where delivery costs are a problem. I live in an exurban area but I imagine UPS economics works fine here. If I live in the back of beyond I imagine it's hard to make any delivery system work without subsidies.
- rtehfm 11y agoCreating tunnels would be several orders of magnitude more expensive than creating the technology for drone delivery, lobbying for it's adoption across various municipalities and so on.
- dikdik 11y agoNew York City tried something like this with pneumatic tubes for delivering mail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube_mail_in_New_York_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube_mail_in_New_Yor...
- jeffbarr 11y agoSeattle's current tunnel project isn't going all that well...
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- dharma1 11y agostill gonna get shot down in texas
- gist 11y agoIt would seem to be a better option to try and drop a package by parachute rather than have to land the drone, release and takeoff. If the package is only 5 lbs. or less and has a parachute attached that seems much safer (for both the drone and for people) than landing and taking off assuming a predetermined landing spot is located. My other issue with this is given changing weather conditions and the amount of wind or rain a drone can handle (energy efficiently that is) how many days per year can this service be offered vs. how many customers there actually are that need this type of delivery. (Note the example that they give ..)
- repsilat 11y ago> by parachute ... > wind or rain Obviously parachute delivery is more sensitive to weather conditions. Parachutes would need active guidance to be at all practical. If the parachutes and guidance systems aren't recoverable (collected from your mailbox, maybe?) that'll add to delivery costs.
- cxseven 11y agoEvery neighborhood should have a delivery nexus where packages are to be picked up / dropped off! That'd make more sense than everyone needing a dedicated Amazon landing pad in their backyard. You could also have fresh baked goods and produce economically delivered daily like they did back in the cutting edge of the 1800s.
- alooPotato 11y agoI'm really curious how this beats a amazon owned delivery truck? Serious question. Economically and at scale, it seems like both the truck and drone are actually pretty cheap. Speed of delivery and at scale, the only way the drone is faster is if there is a warehouse in each city and your item is stocked. Otherwise, the bottleneck in delivery time is the long distance shipping. Feasibility and at scale, the truck seems way less risky and more adaptable to bad conditions.
- darkxanthos 11y agoWith automated drones and Amazon brick and mortar stores the idea of large warehouses could be challenged. They could shift packages in an automated fashion to areas with more probable demand. Drones are crazy cheap as well. I can imagine hundreds of these in the sky at once in Chicago if not thousands.
- ghaff 11y ago>I can imagine hundreds of these in the sky at once in Chicago if not thousands. Which sounds like an utterly horrifying scenario. It's not so much that I can't imagine this sort of delivery not working in some scenarios as that I have a lot of trouble imagining it working at scale.
- Retric 11y agoOften going 5 miles in a city can take 30+ minutes. So using drones makes this easier. Further per package delivery costs are probably lower. At day 10,000$ per drone, an average deliver 8 packages a day, for 3 years. That's 1.25$ per package.
- methehack 11y agoI don't think this will be everywhere, just urban -- at least a t first. My guess is they'll also use PrimeNow (1, 2, 4 hour delivery by car/truck from a localized warehouse -- happening NOW in my city) as a canary in a coal mine to test a given market's suitability to immediate delivery (in terms of demand, regulatory env, probably tons of other factors).
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- zw123456 11y agoFor a while I have thought that a cool way of doing this would be if the drones could fly close to high voltage power lines and use induction to power it and charge the battery. Then when it gets close to the destination it could peel away from the high tension lines and use battery for to cover the last mile. That way you could have the warehouse in some industrial area or whatever. They could make a deal with the power companies and those lines could be like the arterial lines for the drones. I have Googled around and this is not a new idea but I have not seen anyone try it or test it, at least not from the searches I have done. I believe it is feasible as those lines are 500KV and as a drone moves past it, there is a significant EM field around it and an inductor lowered down 20 feet or so from the drone could pick up enough power while maintaining a safe distance. Has anyone else heard of such a thing being tried anywhere ?
- guroot 11y agoWouldn't that pose problems for the navigation equipment?
- brandmeyer 11y agoDepends on how the IMU and GPS are designed. It could pose a problem for equipment that isn't purposed-designed to ignore that frequency. However, textbook solutions for that problem exist. 60 Hz is well outside the vehicle's closed-loop control bandwidth, so just ensuring that there isn't an aliasing problem with that (or the rectified 120 Hz) would be sufficient.
- mark-r 11y agoI once worked in a building that had one of those power lines running next to it. Was curious if there was a measurable effect on a car parked under it in the parking lot. A multimeter found 600 volts between the car and ground.
- blackjack48 11y agoA couple days ago, I needed a new cordless landline phone and wanted to try out Prime Now. It was impressive that I could track my courier's location and have it arrive within half an hour - only problem was that it was the wrong model. I've ordered hundreds of things from Amazon and can't recall ever receiving an incorrect item. To make matters worse, the CS rep I spoke to said they couldn't send couriers to do returns or exchanges: I had to UPS it 2,000 miles to Kentucky. Winning the ecommerce delivery race won't mean anything unless Amazon can maintain its high accuracy rate and positive user experience.
- eli 11y agoAnd on the day before "Cyber Monday," what an opportune time for Amazon to dominate headline for a day. Such luck.
- TrevorJ 11y agoThinking about it a lot, and I think the simpler way to solve the same problem would be shipping container sized package 'vending machines'. These could be distributed anywhere a couple parking spaces worth of land could be rented. You could either pick up your items yourself, or pickups could be handled via an "uber for packages" type model. The advantage of a system like that would be how quickly it could change based on demand, and it would work well inside all the current shipping infrastructure. The trick would be stocking the right items in the right locations, but if anyone has the data to be able to do that it's Amazon.
- wowzer 11y agoWhile time will tell if we ever actually see this drones in action, imagine how cool it must be for the people working on this project. They get to go to work each day playing with some really fancy model airplanes. Plus, this is Amazon pushing yet another aspect of technology forward. They may overwork their employees, but cool things are coming out of those offices.
- legohead 11y agoCan't wait to see and hear hundreds of drones in the sky.
- shpx 11y agoYea this was one of my first thoughts too, drones are incredibly loud, even if its just one every few minutes it'll be unbearable. There are ideas on how to make them less loud, like putting the props inside the drone, but I suspect it will be very difficult to make them completely silent without flying really high.
- kriro 11y agoMy major takeaway is that they are trying to push as close to instant delivery as possible (30 minutes seems like pretty remarkable goal). Potentially taking out the delivery service middleman is also good. I have my doubts (regulation, security concerns, social doubt a la Google glass) but overall it seems like a good long term strategy to try this. If they ever come close to hitting the 30 minute delivery it also opens up the entire food delivery industry as a potential Amazon extension. Buying one of these "premade meal delivery" startups could also be an option.
- mark-r 11y agoJust imagine ordering your hot pizza delivery from Amazon instead of Domino's for example.
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago> If they ever come close to hitting the 30 minute delivery it also opens up the entire food delivery industry as a potential Amazon extension. Buying one of these "premade meal delivery" startups could also be an option. This is my thinking as well. I'm actually surprised they haven't started a small project in a specific area where they're delivering hot meals. It feels like they want to, eventually, sell everything possible to people. I would actually be surprised if they don't, eventually, buy several of these start-ups around prepared food delivery.
- shostack 11y agoBingo on the food. Literally none of these food delivery startups will be able to compete with the speed, price, cash, and logistics infrastructure Amazon will be able to bring to the table for that area. Delivery people, like cab/Uber drivers are service industries chugging along on borrowed time until their jobs can be fully automated.
- RandallBrown 11y agoAmazon already does meal delivery in Seattle. https://local.amazon.com/delivery_on_prime https://local.amazon.com/delivery_on_prime
- orasis 11y agoThe big question is: How loud are the drones? Every quad-rotor I've been around is too loud for the average upscale neighborhood that these will be delivering to.
- kylehotchkiss 11y agoAnybody know where this was filmed?
- damian2000 11y agoThis made me think about self driving cars and whether its possible to make a self driving delivery van or truck - able to handle bulkier / heavier loads and all weather conditions.