7 ms·
AKA helicopters?
by fooker 9y ago
AKA helicopters?
- rwmj 9y ago... without pilots, and presumably also without many of the safety features that go with aircraft that carry humans. I wonder what will happen the first time one of these falls out of the air on to something.
- Gracana 9y agoI suspect you'd still need a lot of safety/reliability/redundancy/failsafe type features, because if it crashes it could still kill people.
- mtgx 9y agoAnd who will be liable? The drone manufacturer or the shipping company? Or no one?
- maxerickson 9y agoIn most places the operator will be liable. Not "operator" in the sense of the person giving it commands, but the entity that ultimately decides where and why it flies.
- tehlike 9y agoand there will always be "insurance" for such cases :)
- tehlike 9y agounmanned choppers existed, iirc. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/oct/30/black-hawk-drone-unmanned-chopper-passes-critical-/ http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/oct/30/black-hawk-d... I think the answer is, lots of news coverage. Probably would have been the same amount if it were a manned one.
- drzaiusapelord 9y agoExcept that's for military applications. If that thing crashes in a field in a war zone no one cares. If it crashes into a high rise and kills hundreds of office workers, then people will care. Unmanned heavy flight in populated civilian areas isn't a solved problem and probably one that will never be solved. People won't want the risk. Saving $1 on shipping isn't worth it.
- mysterydip 9y agoWhat about longer but still quicker routes than a typical delivery truck? Having a drone means it could do the same pre-programmed route every time. Instead of as-the-crow-flies, have it take a route that's mostly over unpopulated areas but ultimately saves time and money by avoiding traffic, intersections, bridges, etc.
- tehlike 9y agoTime is only one of the aspects. UAV can do the same task over and over, and wouldn't have the legislations that limit per-driver throughput (like continuous amount of driving one is allowed). So even if you take longer distances, there will be other benefits.
- tehlike 9y agoas a person who developed UAVs in a smaller scale, I agree with your sentiment on crashing. But i guess this is similar to how crashes from traffic went down over time. We can take all the precautions, do hundreds of thousands of simulations, and it will get better over time.
- danblick 9y agoWell, if your craft is unmanned then it can be very small, which makes the idea appealing for the last mile and less appealing as you start moving cargos the size of a human anyway.
- tomjen3 9y agoThe routes could be planned so that they could always crash on some place where they wouldn't hurt a human. You don't need the same kind of safety features in an unmanaged cargo drone as you do in something that transport humans.
- Bartweiss 9y agoYou can certainly save some money on cargo-only risks. Sure, the thing can't be allowed to crash onto a village, but you can take some controlled risks like flying in worse weather or using worse takeoff/landing strips than you'd chance with human pilots.
- nradov 9y agoThere are no such routes around the places where people are willing to routinely pay a lot for fast delivery. Just look at any map.
- tomjen3 9y agoThat assumes that you have zero glide ability.
- nradov 9y agoMulti-rotor powered lift aircraft have effectively zero glide ability. Helicopters and fixed wing aircraft have some glide availability depending on altitude, but you can't count on gliding anywhere when you're experiencing some sort of serious systems failure. And there are generally no safe places to crash in densely populated areas.
- jdmichal 9y agoHelicopters can autorotate under full engine failure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorotation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorotation
- TeMPOraL 9y agoBut can multirotors do that too? N-copters seem to have pretty small propellers; will they be able to store enough kinetic energy for autorotation? Also, AFAIK electric motors directly connected to propellers don't exactly have "idle" mode - they either use power or generate power.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoFor whatever it's worth, one of the other comments points out that heavy-lift drones are likely to be conventional helicopters rather than multicopters, since smaller rotors are less efficient.
- repiret 9y agoIf the terminals of the motor are open, it will rotate freely.
- usrusr 9y agoAutorotation uses the energy stored in mass x height to spin the rotor for most of the descent, they are "charging" the kinetic storage until very close to the ground. This speed kinetic energy is only used for the final touchdown. The fixed pitch blades of a multicopter make this impossible. Autorotation is not a question of rotor mass, it's a question of pitch control. Lack of pitch control is the defining property of multicopters.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoI forgot about pitch control, which is indeed the deciding factor here, but still - isn't the angular momentum used as that "kinetic energy storage"? Small, light propellers suck at that anyway.
- tehlike 9y agoHelicopters are not fuel efficient. Something with a wing with vertical take off capability is probably much better for such cases.
- strin 9y agoTrue. Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) takes about 6 times the energy as much as flying with a wing. Companies are racing to add VTOL to winged aircrafts: https://lilium.com/ https://lilium.com/.
- usrusr 9y agoIt says "200 miles", so it's probably closer to unmanned pipers than to giant DJIs. The description reads more like using the cargo UAVs as a solution for slow inter-city surface transport (or as a substitute for expensive bush pilots) than as a solution for the last mile.