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What we have here is kind of lack of imagination. There are at least 2 parts of delivery that I see can be worked on with drones. One is last mile delivery, tha

What we have here is kind of lack of imagination. There are at least 2 parts of delivery that I see can be worked on with drones. One is last mile delivery, that honestly is challenging, unless you live in suburban or rural area. However one, more interesting and probably lucrative part that should be easier to implement would be transport between major hub to nearby delivery point. Since these points can be built out and/or prepared, you can have deliveries coming non-stop, through FAA approved route, and then delivered from there. It doesn't even have to be dedicated Amazon employee, they can offer pick up or delivery by Uber or something like that. For me this part can be very creative and I am surprised that Amazon doesn't see this as promising area of investment.

ChuckMcM 11y ago
That is certainly an interesting point. Modern distribution centers use conveyers to move packages to the truck loading port where they will be loaded on to trucks for delivery. Why not extend the conveyer through the sky to a truck loading port a couple of miles away. If you lay out reliable ingress/egress channels for the drone traffic you could probably stack 300 - 400 drones per mile in that channel, operating all day would certainly expand the virtual "size" of your warehouse.
- desireco42 11y ago
  That is pretty much how I would envision it. Once you build that, suddenly another level of things that we can't even imagine today are becoming available. Plus ecologically would probably be very good and less trucks on the roads.
notahacker 11y ago
The problems with the major hub to the delivery point are the same as some of those identified in the article: drones currently in operation don't have much carrying capability, and compensating for that with significantly more drones adds cost over a truck. Even if you scale your drones up to truck size and don't have any range limitations, you're carrying packages a similar distance whilst fighting gravity all the way. And if bottlenecks with sorting at each end and last mile are unchanged, the extra cost of cutting out trucks sat in traffic in the middle of the supply chain might make surprisingly little distance to delivery times. Getting the FAA to approve airways for long distance autonomous commercial cargo transport without prohibitive fees sounds like a challenge too...
- desireco42 11y ago
  So what you are saying, there are no serious technical challenges (I think there are few challenges to be solved), just bureaucratic ones. That one are always solved with money, something Amazon clearly has. Again, this is just an idea to show how this can be much more than it is today.
  - notahacker 11y ago
    That's not really what I was saying at all. I'm saying we have good reason to expect drone technology to continue to be vastly more expensive than trucks for transporting groups of packages over long distance, and little reason to believe that drones will make a significant enough impact on delivery time for it to be worth it for the types of products normally ordered from Amazon since the bottlenecks are all elsewhere. I haven't seen too many long-distance, high-payload drones on the market either...
    - e12e 11y ago
      I suppose it depends on ones definition of "high payload". How many books to a Hellfire missile? Granted the military drones used for attack missions don't do VTOL, and aren't ready for autonomous take-off and landing (yet). But I believe there's lot of research in the area, and it doesn't seem inconceivable that a company like Amazon might get use from short, purpose-built landing-strips for similarily purpose-built drones. Speaking of military delivery - I wonder if it might be possible to build one-off "drones-as-packaging" with maybe a parachute for breaking and a quadcopter-like design for final steering that allows for dropping "smart" packages from the sky down to a porch...
      - notahacker 11y ago
        Suggesting a $5M piece of military hardware capable of carrying a single 100lb missile pretty much emphasises my point about trucks (or even motorbikes!) being far superior options for medium-long distance transit. No matter how much research goes into developing commercial alternatives, carrying books through the air over long distances at speed rather than driving them along roads will expend significantly more energy and cost more money, because physics. And whilst getting goods by parachute might have novelty value if I'm around to watch or be extremely useful if I'm stuck somewhere up a mountain, for everyday goods delivery I'd frankly rather have them handed to me by a person that considers the goods "delivered" when they're in my hands rather than probably in the right garden. It's also why their current delivery drivers aren't encouraged to save time by throwing non-fragile items at customers' houses as they drive past.

ChuckMcM 11y ago

That is certainly an interesting point. Modern distribution centers use conveyers to move packages to the truck loading port where they will be loaded on to trucks for delivery. Why not extend the conveyer through the sky to a truck loading port a couple of miles away. If you lay out reliable ingress/egress channels for the drone traffic you could probably stack 300 - 400 drones per mile in that channel, operating all day would certainly expand the virtual "size" of your warehouse.

desireco42 11y ago
That is pretty much how I would envision it. Once you build that, suddenly another level of things that we can't even imagine today are becoming available. Plus ecologically would probably be very good and less trucks on the roads.

notahacker 11y ago

The problems with the major hub to the delivery point are the same as some of those identified in the article: drones currently in operation don't have much carrying capability, and compensating for that with significantly more drones adds cost over a truck. Even if you scale your drones up to truck size and don't have any range limitations, you're carrying packages a similar distance whilst fighting gravity all the way. And if bottlenecks with sorting at each end and last mile are unchanged, the extra cost of cutting out trucks sat in traffic in the middle of the supply chain might make surprisingly little distance to delivery times. Getting the FAA to approve airways for long distance autonomous commercial cargo transport without prohibitive fees sounds like a challenge too...

desireco42 11y ago
So what you are saying, there are no serious technical challenges (I think there are few challenges to be solved), just bureaucratic ones. That one are always solved with money, something Amazon clearly has. Again, this is just an idea to show how this can be much more than it is today.
- notahacker 11y ago
  That's not really what I was saying at all. I'm saying we have good reason to expect drone technology to continue to be vastly more expensive than trucks for transporting groups of packages over long distance, and little reason to believe that drones will make a significant enough impact on delivery time for it to be worth it for the types of products normally ordered from Amazon since the bottlenecks are all elsewhere. I haven't seen too many long-distance, high-payload drones on the market either...
  - e12e 11y ago
    I suppose it depends on ones definition of "high payload". How many books to a Hellfire missile? Granted the military drones used for attack missions don't do VTOL, and aren't ready for autonomous take-off and landing (yet). But I believe there's lot of research in the area, and it doesn't seem inconceivable that a company like Amazon might get use from short, purpose-built landing-strips for similarily purpose-built drones. Speaking of military delivery - I wonder if it might be possible to build one-off "drones-as-packaging" with maybe a parachute for breaking and a quadcopter-like design for final steering that allows for dropping "smart" packages from the sky down to a porch...
    - notahacker 11y ago
      Suggesting a $5M piece of military hardware capable of carrying a single 100lb missile pretty much emphasises my point about trucks (or even motorbikes!) being far superior options for medium-long distance transit. No matter how much research goes into developing commercial alternatives, carrying books through the air over long distances at speed rather than driving them along roads will expend significantly more energy and cost more money, because physics. And whilst getting goods by parachute might have novelty value if I'm around to watch or be extremely useful if I'm stuck somewhere up a mountain, for everyday goods delivery I'd frankly rather have them handed to me by a person that considers the goods "delivered" when they're in my hands rather than probably in the right garden. It's also why their current delivery drivers aren't encouraged to save time by throwing non-fragile items at customers' houses as they drive past.