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Swiss Post Suspends Drone Delivery Service After Second Crash

155 points by sytelus 7y ago

sytelus 7y ago
This could have been very ugly: the 10-kg drone suffered an uncontrolled crash “in a wooded area of Zurich’s university quarter only 50 yards away from a group of playing kindergarten children.” One of the things that few people are aware about is quadrotor MTBF is very low relative to other common vehicles. For many drones, the expectation for failure dramatically increases just after 100-200 hours of operation[1]. Figuring out points of failures, building systematic fault trees and increasing MTBF by order of magnitude or two would be big part of the drone delivery projects. [1] https://catsr.vse.gmu.edu/SYST490/490_2014_SPDAV/DST-NSPDAV_USMA.pdf https://catsr.vse.gmu.edu/SYST490/490_2014_SPDAV/DST-NSPDAV_...
- jcims 7y ago
  Quadrotor form factor seems unusual for something that clearly has reliability/safety as a high priority.
  - asteli 7y ago
    I think multirotors have the capability to be made quite safe. The only moving parts are the rotors, and with higher rotor counts, graceful degradation of flight performance is possible in the case of a rotor-out. Problem is that most of the components (batteries, motor controllers, flight controllers) are built by and for hobbyists. Motor burns a winding? ESC spontaneously lets the smoke out? Whatever, they're $15 bucks each. The field of "commercial grade cargo multirotor" is still in its infancy. The balance of safety and cost for the components hasn't been struck in the market. You either deal with random chinese components and control algorithms written by intrepid RC airplane nuts, buy very expensive industrial/aerospace grade components, or roll your own solution.
    - bigiain 7y ago
      Hexes and octocopters are "safer" than quads - since they can (with appropriate controllers) cope with any one motor/controller out, and some combinations of multiple motors out. (Anyone flying expensive DSLR cameras uses these for that reason.) There are some quad copter controllers that try to deal with single motor failures, but they're mostly experimental (at least on the hobby end to the space) since they need to be able to reverse a motor, which most motor controllers used in these applications are not build to do.
      - asteli 7y ago
        I recall a quadcopter control mode that spins the entire craft quite rapidly, exchanging yaw control for altitude control. Found a vid: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bsHryqnvyYA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bsHryqnvyYA
        bigiain 7y ago
        Without even clicking that I knew it was gonna be ETH Zurich... They do pure magic. Pretty much nobody _else's_ quadcopters can survive a motor failure... (But it'll come, presumably. Amazing software is cheaper than redundant hardware, after all...)
        toxik 7y ago
        Not to detract from how cool this work is but the preconditions for this to work are quite far-reaching. It is based on bridging the reality gap by having that gap approach zero - by removing error sources from the real world rather than model and account for them. Same goes for other ASL work.
    - mc32 7y ago
      I don’t expect a service delivery company to use hobbyist components. That’d be s recipe for disaster. One would think they’d put something like this though its paces before testing it out in public. I’d expect they buy aerospace grade components where possible and build their own to spec where needed.
  - bayesian_horse 7y ago
    In a sense, most other aerial vehicle types are worse. Helicopters, with only one main rotor are incredibly complex machines requiring constant maintenance. The rotor blades are articulated to provide flight control. Quadcopters are a ton simpler because their rotors are "just" rotors, and flight control is achieved through differential thrust, not angling the blades. On the other hand, helicopters often seem to deal with engine failure better than quadcopters or even fixed wing aircraft. Fixed wing drones have the big problem that they need to go fast to stay in the air. Which requires a lot more motion planning.
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      Your typical helicopter is made to entirely different standards than your typical drone.
      - bayesian_horse 7y ago
        Yes, of course. But toy helicopters have been around for a lot longer than quad-copters have been popular. And I've not seen a lot of people using single-rotor RC helicopters for filming and delivery (I'm sure there are some ...). My point is that multicopters are a lot simpler mechanically. No articulation, no transmission, just propellers on an electrical motor, controlled by pure electronics with no mechanical components in the loop except the drive coils. Arguably multicopters are easier to control automatically (with modern electronics), though that wouldn't be THAT big a factor today, I guess. Also electrical engines can deal a lot better with variable load and RPM. Multicopters with combustion engines (driving the rotors directly, not through a generator) seem to be quite uncommon. Still, if multicopters are supposed to be routinely used in the presence of people, they need similar standards of maintenance and failure control as would bigger aircraft, be they manned or unmanned...
    - jcims 7y ago
      You're not wrong, but even model helicopters can autorotate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxQ5kwqiPN4&t=135 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxQ5kwqiPN4&t=135
- crazygringo 7y ago
  Wow, that's shockingly low. The paper doesn't describe why -- do you have any idea what part(s) are failing so quickly? The rotors, the motors, the battery? For commercial delivery service, it seems quite clear that we'll need either 1) "enterprise-grade" drones (like difference between consumer and enterprise SSD's), 2) reliable sensors to detect imminent failure before a flight, and/or 3) easy replacement of failing parts. I mean, for many hobbyists 100-200 hrs seems like a reasonable cost/benefit tradeoff... but not even close for commercial delivery services.
  - sytelus 7y ago
    Commercial drones can push to 10^3 hrs but that's still far cry from aviation standards of 10^5 hrs. According to this nav system and fuel+actuators are two big failing components: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6165073/pdf/sensors-18-03171.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6165073/pdf/sen...
    - crazygringo 7y ago
      That article seems to be referring to winged UAV drones (e.g. Predator) not the quadcopter-type drones used for deliveries.
      - bitxbitxbitcoin 7y ago
        Good catch. It is possible for quadcopter-type drones to come with four extra motors that sit opposite of the traditional four motors and props and face down with slightly different sized props and rotating the opposite way. In the case of failure of a prop in this configuration (the most common failure in my own experience with quads and octos), it is possible to program the n-copter to automatically change to flying in 7 prop mode or 6 prop mode or 5 prop mode, and so on and so forth as a redundancy feature. This could help with a not insignificant amount of crashes but obviously comes with increased costs.
    - TylerE 7y ago
      Airplanes get regular (and quite extensive) maintenance though.
- walrus01 7y ago
  Arducopter flight controller user here: There is a reason why pro grade filming setups carrying $40,000 to $150,000 cameras are all coaxial octocopters or flat octocopters. Even a hexacopter cannot 100% reliably recover from a single motor failure. Personal opinion, any craft that is over 3 to 4kg and spends time over people needs to be an octo.
  - 4ntonius8lock 7y ago
    Thanks for contributing toward progress and not toward fear/restriction.
    - walrus01 7y ago
      There's valid technical reasons for having a coaxial octo within a total craft body+arm size radius of 1.5 meters as well. You can generate more thrust and carry more payload for the same disc loading area. Four large motors and four 28" CF props produce less thrust than four arms, each arm with two motors stacked, and eight props. Octos are not a conservative, redundant, fail tolerant design decision just for the sake of protecting expensive gear. Many of them still have 1+0 non redundant power systems.
  - sytelus 7y ago
    I've held the opinion that we shouldn't be using multirotors but VTOLs when it comes to aerial deliveries. The multirotors are extremely energy inefficient, have very low MTBF, short-range and very low payload cap. On the other hand designing safe reliable VTOL is hard but solvable problem when thrown enough resources because you can draw a lot from existing aviation tech. However, Amazon has gone through quadrotors to VTOL and then they switched back to multirotor again, surprisingly. Unfortunately, most of the delivery vehicles are being built by relatively small limited resources startup-like groups. While multirotors are very easy to build, they have an enormous number of problems. I think if there was a well-funded group of 500 or so engineers working over ~5 years, there is a decent chance we can have safe reliable commercial-grade VTOL for autonomous point-to-point deliveries that can be adopted as standard. Unfortunately, this is a big capex project.
- dmix 7y ago
  Can’t this be mitigated with parachutes and other safety measures when certain descent speeds or other failures are detected? It could also broadcast an alarm during any descent to warn people.
  - sytelus 7y ago
    Perhaps you didn't read the article but that's exactly what they had. The drone would flash light, deploy chute and make big whistle sound if it detected a crash. The problem is that it still does count as a crash. In the second crash chute system, itself failed.
- kuzehanka 7y ago
  That figure doesn't sound convincing, and the linked paper seems to just make it up without any explanation or justification. The limiting factor of a quad's ability to fly is the motor and unexpected failure of the battery. Higher end brushless motors have a life expectancy in the tens of thousands of hours. Battery failure is already mitigated in consumer drones by having independent packs each of which provides enough current to continue operation. Quads do occasionally just fall out of the sky because a defective bearing ceases or a defective cell sags, but it's very rare. Most of the time they crash due to operator error.
  - neals 7y ago
    That's some interesting statistics you claim, would love to see the source on that.
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      Considering that mechanical failure is basically a rounding error compared to human error when it comes to causing crashes of every other vehicle and piece of machinery humans operate I'm inclined to believe the same is true for drones.
      - empath75 7y ago
        People have a much lower tolerance for mechanical failure in vehicles that carry people. Anything that crashed at a higher rate from mechanical failure than human error would not be produced for very long.
  - davinic 7y ago
    You've left out the critical component between the battery and the bldc motors: the motor controller. These deal with the most difficult thermal issues and fail frequently. On a quad there a 4 motor controllers on board, and only one needs to fail, greatly increasing the odds of overall failure.
    - 7y ago
- Shivetya 7y ago
  My only question is, why are there no blade guards in place? Not to protect the blades but to protect anyone near this drone?
  - joncrane 7y ago
    I imagine that it reduces efficiency for the fastest part of the blades to pass very close to a stationary ring, as opposed to letting the turbulence tumble off the ends of the blades unimpeded.
Invictus0 7y ago
Seems strange that Swiss Post would be the first to test out these drones, given the extremely high standard of quality that the Swiss demand. The reality is that any new technology, especially hardware, will need time to mature and work out the bugs. One crash out of 3000 isn't that bad: reality has a lot of edge cases to test for.
- sytelus 7y ago
  > One crash out of 3000 isn't that bad It is actually very bad. Amazon ships ~2M packages per day by one estimates. Assume only 10% of these gets drone delivered. This would translate to 66 crashes each day. If only 10% of these crashes happen on people, it would be 6 people randomly getting killed each day.
  - Invictus0 7y ago
    This isn't a constant linear crash rate. Each crash creates the impetus for a more robust product generation. But in the beginning, you should expect to see things go wrong. See SpaceX for example.
    - PhilWright 7y ago
      People getting hit on the head is not acceptable whilst the technology and standards mature. A few rockets blowing up, without hurting anyone, is acceptable whilst technology matures.
      - bigiain 7y ago
        So far as I can tell - nobody has (yet?) been hit on the head with a delivery drone.
  - gwicksted 7y ago
    May the odds forever be in your favor ;)
  - 4ntonius8lock 7y ago
zwkrt 7y ago
I agree that this is bad, 2 crashes at relatively low volume is not great. However, I do wonder if reason will prevail in the long run with regards to overall safety and environmental impact. I recall early laws being very unfair to vehicular traffic, such as the apocryphal law that if a car startled a horse the owner should dismantle the car until the horse is no longer perturbed.
PhilWright 7y ago
Having large numbers of drones in the sky, where any failure has the potential to drop a large weight on a person seems like a show stopper. Or just crashing onto a house or car and causing damage is going to get annoying for the community real fast. I doubt drones can be made as reliable as aeroplanes at anything like a realistic price.
- weddpros 7y ago
  This is an emotional answer: "any failure...potential... large weight... person... show stopper". That's emotions speaking, we need probabilities and reason instead (because a delivery truck should trigger the same fear with you but it doesn't). Planes ARE the safest way to travel: maybe drones are the safest in certain conditions, like for these urgent hospital deliveries in Switzerland, or in dangerous/isolated settings. And maybe drones will become safer and safer, like with parachutes in the article. Okay the parachutes will need Dyneema strings instead of simple ones, just like parachutes were used before Dyneema was invented. Oh wait, someone's working on Dyneema parachutes for drones: https://www.textilemedia.com/latest-news/mobiletex/drone-parachute-manufactured-from-dyneema/ https://www.textilemedia.com/latest-news/mobiletex/drone-par... As you can see, there's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Find how you can save lives and make the world better, not how to use emotions to exert power and kill Freedom. The world needs innovation more than ever, be it electronic cigarettes or self driving cars or drones.
  - sytelus 7y ago
    Probabilities and stats are actually incomplete and naive way people justify human deaths. Let's say you hit another car and kill another driver because you were texting. This would lead to perhaps prison, heavy fines and taking you off the road to prevent future incidence. However, cars themselves would not get banned. Now imagine the accident was because of car malfunction and not your mistake. What would happen? You guessed right: that models of cars would be taken away from the road. Now here's a thought experiment: Let's say humans have a choice of only two models of cars: A and B. Car A fails less often, kills fewer people overall but none of the failures are due to human mistake. It just speeds up randomly and uncontrollably sometimes and kills whoever is on the way. Engineers have raised their hand that this cannot be fixed for a few years. On the other hand, car B fails only when a human makes a mistake even though its statistically 10X more overall failures per year. Which car society would approve?
4ntonius8lock 7y ago
Sadly, as pointed out by Neil deGrasse Tyson, we respond to spectacle over data. How many deaths per 1,000,000,000 package delivery happen with trucks? Truck deliver is not a zero death thing. I'd even want to see truck air pollution factored in somehow. If drones have a lower %, we should view falling death boxes as acceptable. Even though it does have a strangely dystonia aspect to it.
- PhilWright 7y ago
  I think the difference from a psychological point of view is that getting a drone drop randomly on your head feels, well random. Therefore it does not feel like you can do much of anything to avoid it, unlikely though it would be in practice. Getting killed by a terrorist or mass killer feels equally bad because it is random. But something like sky divers getting killed does not bother me because I can avoid it, by not sky diving. Just like I can choose not to drive and so avoid almost any chance of being killed by another driver. It is the randomness and the fact you cannot avoid it that, I think, makes to less acceptable.
  - weddpros 7y ago
    I personally know someone who was killed by a UPS truck on his parking lot. Don't think randomness only happens to others.
    - reaperducer 7y ago
      But the example you use is exactly that: something happening to another person.
  - 4ntonius8lock 7y ago
    People who don't drive don't get killed by trucks? That's news to me. I was thinking trucks get into accidents with public transportation, as well as run over pedestrians and bicyclists. The fact that it doesn't appear random doesn't mean it isn't. Getting killed by medical malpractice is also random, yet we don't really fret over our extremely error prone medical system. We don't even argue for removing doctors working 24 hour shifts, while we wouldn't allow a street sweeper to do the same.
jimmaswell 7y ago
It seems so cowardly halting progress so fast just because of two harmless crashes. There's never going to be zero risk to anything. Still much safer than cars so far.
- specialp 7y ago
  Progress is not necessarily halted by not having something in production. Perhaps it needs more work in testing. The article says 3000 successes/2 failures. That is too high when you have 10kg things falling out of the sky.
  - rtpg 7y ago
    2 packages falling from the sky over 3000.... sounds like a higher failure rate than the current vehicle delivery mechanisms. I wonder what the score is for postal vehicles (similarly for crashes with other vehicles and the like)
- twblalock 7y ago
  The public has already accepted the risk of car crashes, but not the risk of drone crashes. "Safer than cars" assumes people have a purely mathematical approach to risk, but in fact people always err on the side of the status quo unless a new thing is way better. This particular drone crashed near a school -- if it had hit a child, there would be demands to ban drone deliveries, and you just know that politicians never miss an opportunity to grandstand about public safety, particularly when children are involved. It's better to back off for now, improve the drones, and try again later, because one or two bad accidents could end the entire project. We are more likely to end up with drone deliveries when the drone companies are sensitive to managing the public reaction.
  - rjf72 7y ago
    I don't think it's that people's natural conservatism when it comes to technology has changed, but rather our inclination to indulge (and enforce) such conservatism on nation wide levels. If merry-go-rounds, swings, and climbing polls were not already staples of childhood play, would we allow them today? I mean a child can get quite high in a swing and fall out. He can even die. Indeed looking at the numbers just between 1990 and 2000 some 147 children < 14 years old died on playgrounds in the US alone. [1] About 45 of those deaths were on public playgrounds. Injures requiring emergency room visits are exponentially more common with the majority occurring at schools. I think the answer is a resounding no, we would not even consider allowing playgrounds today. And that's quite pitiful. Taleb wrote an interesting article on how the most intolerant within a society eventually come to determine its fate, nearly regardless of their size. [2] It may be only a few percent of society that would not allow playgrounds, but so long as these people complain loud enough - they will win. Because their aversion to any sort of risk whatsoever is unlikely to be countered by a group that happen to be equally fervent 'playground enthusiast.' And so the path of least resistance is to simply ban playgrounds. Hahah, hopefully this post doesn't give somebody the idea to go start an attention seeking social media campaign to ban playgrounds. It might very well succeed! [1] - https://www.cdc.gov/HomeandRecreationalSafety/Playground-Injuries/playgroundinjuries-factsheet.htm https://www.cdc.gov/HomeandRecreationalSafety/Playground-Inj... [2] - https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
raynr 7y ago
As an additional potential recovery mode: ETH Zurich's Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control [0] has done amazing work on quadcopter recovery after rotor control loss [1] (I believe they are down to controlled flight with only one or two rotors left, but I cannot find the link right now). I've been waiting for this to filter into the real world but have yet to see it. [0] https://idsc.ethz.ch/ https://idsc.ethz.ch/ [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek0FrCaogcs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek0FrCaogcs
- rkagerer 7y ago
  This is really impressive. Are the algos published / open sourced / licensable?
  - nairboon 7y ago
    Here you go: https://www.flyingmachinearena.ethz.ch/wp-content/publications/2014/mueIEEE14.pdf https://www.flyingmachinearena.ethz.ch/wp-content/publicatio...
shpx 7y ago
> According to the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the 10-kg drone suffered an uncontrolled crash “in a wooded area of Zurich’s university quarter only 50 yards away from a group of playing kindergarten children.” Something tells me that a German newspaper wouldn't be using yards. Sure enough, looking at the source, it's a mistake in Google's translation model > Dass die mehr als 10 Kilogramm schwere Drohne vom Typ Matternet M2V9 in einem Waldstück des Zürcher Universitätsviertels nur rund 50 Meter entfernt von einer Gruppe spielender Kindergartenkinder zu Boden krachte, erwähnte der staatliche Logistikkonzern indes nicht. Bing translate gets it right though.
- kgwgk 7y ago
  That’s a fine translation, better than “only 54.68 yards away from a group of playing kindergarten children.”
  - jaclaz 7y ago
    Well, to be fair the original German has "rund" in it that was lost in translation, so that would be "only approximately 50 meters", which would make the 50 yards acceptable. Probably I would have translated it as "less than 60 yards" ;-).
    - jarvic 7y ago
      Interestingly, if you remove "rund" it changes from "only 50 yards" to "just 50 meters".
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Yards and meters are interchangeable for news purposes, since the estimates are well within the percentage difference between a single yard and a single meter. When a news article says '100 meters from the accident' it does not imply someone used a tape measure.
alex_young 7y ago
Amazing. I can see my flat in that photo :) Anyway, I think there are a few things to point out here: This program was in place to test the efficiency of sending biological samples between hospitals quickly. I'm not entirely sure why this is a problem we need to solve. Is it really better to use drone delivery of blood samples to central hospitals than to add another testing machine at the remote location? Seems like the answer could be no. It's really weird to get a letter in the mail telling you that a blood delivery drone crashed in a lake nearby. This program seems like it's an answer in search of a problem.
- erklik 7y ago
  > Is it really better to use drone delivery of blood samples to central hospitals than to add another testing machine at the remote location? Could it be a case of being cheaper to use drones instead of setting up an actual lab?
- jobigoud 7y ago
  Wow that is another level. Now in the event of a crash there are issue related to contamination, and also personal medical information leakage. Besides crashes, another issue with autonomous vehicles traveling without passengers is going to be hijacking for payload and parts. Maybe not in Switzerland, but in the US there are already people stealing packages right on other people's properties, now they can do the same in the middle of nowhere, plus grab a large drone in the process and resell parts. Capture, cut power, disassemble, deactivate the GPS if it has its own power source, done.
- anonoholic 7y ago
  A lab is not just "a testing machine". Depending on the analysis being performed, you need an array specialist equipment. Then the lab has to be staffed. I imagine shipping samples to a shared facility is significantly more cost effective, otherwise it wouldn't be being trialled. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_laboratory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_laboratory
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
bayesian_horse 7y ago
Who could have guessed that falling out of the sky would be the main issue with things carrying things through the sky?
1023bytes 7y ago
Delivery drones are definitely unnecessary in densely populated areas. It's cool and futuristic, but it's not economical at all, it's very unsafe and also loud. However it's a wonderful thing for rural places with poor infrastructure. For example Zipline in Rwanda, one of the most interesting solutions an engineering perspective too: https://youtube.com/watch?v=jEbRVNxL44c https://youtube.com/watch?v=jEbRVNxL44c
lazyjones 7y ago
This was posted a few days ago when it was "news": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20590407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20590407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20563123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20563123 It's really odd sometimes how duplicate, late posts get more comments and upvotes than the original. Perhaps the time of posting is too important.
nairboon 7y ago
> This is the first time we had a failure on the vehicle’s parachute system. Doesn't this mean that neither Matternet nor the Swiss Post tested the failure modes of this drone enough? If it never happened before, they didn't test it enough to get any estimate for a MTBF for this particular part. But this is to be expected from the Swiss Post, they do sloppy work and blame others, just read their dementi: >As such, we have asked Matternet to implement various urgent measures: >[...]The shrill whistle, which alerts people near the drone when it is making an emergency landing, will be made louder. The whistle couldn't be heard in that accident... Sound like somebody didn't test a single emergency landing in that forest and asked the numerous strollers whether they have heard anything
ekianjo 7y ago
One thing I don't understand is, why are they doing live testing above inhabited areas? Until the tech is proven, the only right thing to do is to implement drones routes that avoid populated areas as much as possible, or at least go thru very sparsely populated areas by default, until all failure modes are well understood.
- Leherenn 7y ago
  They didn't, it happened over a forest. Many people seem to think it happened near a kindergarten, but that's not the case, it just happened that kindergarten-aged kids were playing in the area. You can find everything in the report (in German) https://www.sust.admin.ch/inhalte/AV-berichte/ZB_SUI-9903.pdf https://www.sust.admin.ch/inhalte/AV-berichte/ZB_SUI-9903.pd... Just enter the coordinates of the crash in Google map, you can see there's no school around.
  - ekianjo 7y ago
    Thanks, then the article was confusing on that particular point.
jamisteven 7y ago
Zipline seems to be the more like successor in this field. https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/drones/zipline-emphasizes-safety-with-its-delivery-drones-in-preparation-for-us-operations https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/drones/zipline-...
rkachowski 7y ago
This says ~3000 successful flights with 2 crashes - how many road incidents per journey does a standard mail truck encouter? Is 1500 trips a low / mid / high figure with regards to collisions?
- liability 7y ago
  That's an over-simplified analysis. With road accidents, people have reasonable expectations that certain behaviors can reduce their personal risk of being killed in an accident. For instance, that average includes people who drove drunk, run redlights, drive during ice storms, etc. By avoiding these activities an individual can reduce their personal risk dramatically below the national average. Not to mention I can virtually eliminate any possibility of dying in a traffic accident by remaining in my backyard, where I might still be struck in the head by a delivery drone. What risky behaviours am I meant to avoid there, being outside? You should instead compare the risk somebody following reasonable safety precautions would have in each scenario.
- saalweachter 7y ago
  The USPS has ~30,000 motor vehicle accidents per year. The entire USPS fleet travels ~1.28B miles / year, with the LLVs traveling 764M miles. The LLVs travel about 18 miles per day, 300 days per year, which gives you an estimated 43 million LLV trips per year. Assuming all 30,000 motor vehicle accidents are LLVs, that amounts to 1 accident every 1433 LLV trips. Of course, on each LLV "trip", it delivers letters and parcels to hundreds of addresses; each drone delivery is presumably one. (The USPS also averages 1 accident every ~43,000 miles; this is significantly above the US average of 1 accident per 165,000 miles driven. I would assume the increased rate is (1) USPS vehicles drive slow and stop frequently along their routes; I would guess many accidents are other vehicles driving too fast and trying to pass in unsafe areas (2) distracted driving; drivers are performing other tasks eg retrieving the next addresses mail while driving and (3) every USPS accident is likely reported; drivers are responsible for the condition of their vehicle and small fender-benders that we might not report are likely included in USPS statistics.)
  - petra 7y ago
Down_n_Out 7y ago
I really don't get the hacker news algorithms on these posts, I've submitted this interesting article 7 days ago [0] and there was no interest (which is fine, that's not the issue). I guess 7 days is the cut-off then? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20563123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20563123
benkarst 7y ago
2 crashes. I didn't see the article mention how many successful deliveries there have been.
JetSpiegel 7y ago
Why has IEEE Spectrum turned their nice HTML blog into a site that requires JS to read?

155 points by sytelus 7y ago

This could have been very ugly: the 10-kg drone suffered an uncontrolled crash “in a wooded area of Zurich’s university quarter only 50 yards away from a group of playing kindergarten children.” One of the things that few people are aware about is quadrotor MTBF is very low relative to other common vehicles. For many drones, the expectation for failure dramatically increases just after 100-200 hours of operation[1]. Figuring out points of failures, building systematic fault trees and increasing MTBF by order of magnitude or two would be big part of the drone delivery projects. [1] https://catsr.vse.gmu.edu/SYST490/490_2014_SPDAV/DST-NSPDAV_USMA.pdf https://catsr.vse.gmu.edu/SYST490/490_2014_SPDAV/DST-NSPDAV_...

jcims 7y ago
Quadrotor form factor seems unusual for something that clearly has reliability/safety as a high priority.
- asteli 7y ago
  I think multirotors have the capability to be made quite safe. The only moving parts are the rotors, and with higher rotor counts, graceful degradation of flight performance is possible in the case of a rotor-out. Problem is that most of the components (batteries, motor controllers, flight controllers) are built by and for hobbyists. Motor burns a winding? ESC spontaneously lets the smoke out? Whatever, they're $15 bucks each. The field of "commercial grade cargo multirotor" is still in its infancy. The balance of safety and cost for the components hasn't been struck in the market. You either deal with random chinese components and control algorithms written by intrepid RC airplane nuts, buy very expensive industrial/aerospace grade components, or roll your own solution.
  - bigiain 7y ago
    Hexes and octocopters are "safer" than quads - since they can (with appropriate controllers) cope with any one motor/controller out, and some combinations of multiple motors out. (Anyone flying expensive DSLR cameras uses these for that reason.) There are some quad copter controllers that try to deal with single motor failures, but they're mostly experimental (at least on the hobby end to the space) since they need to be able to reverse a motor, which most motor controllers used in these applications are not build to do.
    - asteli 7y ago
      I recall a quadcopter control mode that spins the entire craft quite rapidly, exchanging yaw control for altitude control. Found a vid: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bsHryqnvyYA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bsHryqnvyYA
      - bigiain 7y ago
        Without even clicking that I knew it was gonna be ETH Zurich... They do pure magic. Pretty much nobody _else's_ quadcopters can survive a motor failure... (But it'll come, presumably. Amazing software is cheaper than redundant hardware, after all...)
        toxik 7y ago
        Not to detract from how cool this work is but the preconditions for this to work are quite far-reaching. It is based on bridging the reality gap by having that gap approach zero - by removing error sources from the real world rather than model and account for them. Same goes for other ASL work.
  - mc32 7y ago
    I don’t expect a service delivery company to use hobbyist components. That’d be s recipe for disaster. One would think they’d put something like this though its paces before testing it out in public. I’d expect they buy aerospace grade components where possible and build their own to spec where needed.
- bayesian_horse 7y ago
  In a sense, most other aerial vehicle types are worse. Helicopters, with only one main rotor are incredibly complex machines requiring constant maintenance. The rotor blades are articulated to provide flight control. Quadcopters are a ton simpler because their rotors are "just" rotors, and flight control is achieved through differential thrust, not angling the blades. On the other hand, helicopters often seem to deal with engine failure better than quadcopters or even fixed wing aircraft. Fixed wing drones have the big problem that they need to go fast to stay in the air. Which requires a lot more motion planning.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    Your typical helicopter is made to entirely different standards than your typical drone.
    - bayesian_horse 7y ago
      Yes, of course. But toy helicopters have been around for a lot longer than quad-copters have been popular. And I've not seen a lot of people using single-rotor RC helicopters for filming and delivery (I'm sure there are some ...). My point is that multicopters are a lot simpler mechanically. No articulation, no transmission, just propellers on an electrical motor, controlled by pure electronics with no mechanical components in the loop except the drive coils. Arguably multicopters are easier to control automatically (with modern electronics), though that wouldn't be THAT big a factor today, I guess. Also electrical engines can deal a lot better with variable load and RPM. Multicopters with combustion engines (driving the rotors directly, not through a generator) seem to be quite uncommon. Still, if multicopters are supposed to be routinely used in the presence of people, they need similar standards of maintenance and failure control as would bigger aircraft, be they manned or unmanned...
  - jcims 7y ago
    You're not wrong, but even model helicopters can autorotate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxQ5kwqiPN4&t=135 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxQ5kwqiPN4&t=135
crazygringo 7y ago
Wow, that's shockingly low. The paper doesn't describe why -- do you have any idea what part(s) are failing so quickly? The rotors, the motors, the battery? For commercial delivery service, it seems quite clear that we'll need either 1) "enterprise-grade" drones (like difference between consumer and enterprise SSD's), 2) reliable sensors to detect imminent failure before a flight, and/or 3) easy replacement of failing parts. I mean, for many hobbyists 100-200 hrs seems like a reasonable cost/benefit tradeoff... but not even close for commercial delivery services.
- sytelus 7y ago
  Commercial drones can push to 10^3 hrs but that's still far cry from aviation standards of 10^5 hrs. According to this nav system and fuel+actuators are two big failing components: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6165073/pdf/sensors-18-03171.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6165073/pdf/sen...
  - crazygringo 7y ago
    That article seems to be referring to winged UAV drones (e.g. Predator) not the quadcopter-type drones used for deliveries.
    - bitxbitxbitcoin 7y ago
      Good catch. It is possible for quadcopter-type drones to come with four extra motors that sit opposite of the traditional four motors and props and face down with slightly different sized props and rotating the opposite way. In the case of failure of a prop in this configuration (the most common failure in my own experience with quads and octos), it is possible to program the n-copter to automatically change to flying in 7 prop mode or 6 prop mode or 5 prop mode, and so on and so forth as a redundancy feature. This could help with a not insignificant amount of crashes but obviously comes with increased costs.
  - TylerE 7y ago
    Airplanes get regular (and quite extensive) maintenance though.
walrus01 7y ago
Arducopter flight controller user here: There is a reason why pro grade filming setups carrying $40,000 to $150,000 cameras are all coaxial octocopters or flat octocopters. Even a hexacopter cannot 100% reliably recover from a single motor failure. Personal opinion, any craft that is over 3 to 4kg and spends time over people needs to be an octo.
- 4ntonius8lock 7y ago
  Thanks for contributing toward progress and not toward fear/restriction.
  - walrus01 7y ago
    There's valid technical reasons for having a coaxial octo within a total craft body+arm size radius of 1.5 meters as well. You can generate more thrust and carry more payload for the same disc loading area. Four large motors and four 28" CF props produce less thrust than four arms, each arm with two motors stacked, and eight props. Octos are not a conservative, redundant, fail tolerant design decision just for the sake of protecting expensive gear. Many of them still have 1+0 non redundant power systems.
- sytelus 7y ago
  I've held the opinion that we shouldn't be using multirotors but VTOLs when it comes to aerial deliveries. The multirotors are extremely energy inefficient, have very low MTBF, short-range and very low payload cap. On the other hand designing safe reliable VTOL is hard but solvable problem when thrown enough resources because you can draw a lot from existing aviation tech. However, Amazon has gone through quadrotors to VTOL and then they switched back to multirotor again, surprisingly. Unfortunately, most of the delivery vehicles are being built by relatively small limited resources startup-like groups. While multirotors are very easy to build, they have an enormous number of problems. I think if there was a well-funded group of 500 or so engineers working over ~5 years, there is a decent chance we can have safe reliable commercial-grade VTOL for autonomous point-to-point deliveries that can be adopted as standard. Unfortunately, this is a big capex project.
dmix 7y ago
Can’t this be mitigated with parachutes and other safety measures when certain descent speeds or other failures are detected? It could also broadcast an alarm during any descent to warn people.
- sytelus 7y ago
  Perhaps you didn't read the article but that's exactly what they had. The drone would flash light, deploy chute and make big whistle sound if it detected a crash. The problem is that it still does count as a crash. In the second crash chute system, itself failed.
kuzehanka 7y ago
That figure doesn't sound convincing, and the linked paper seems to just make it up without any explanation or justification. The limiting factor of a quad's ability to fly is the motor and unexpected failure of the battery. Higher end brushless motors have a life expectancy in the tens of thousands of hours. Battery failure is already mitigated in consumer drones by having independent packs each of which provides enough current to continue operation. Quads do occasionally just fall out of the sky because a defective bearing ceases or a defective cell sags, but it's very rare. Most of the time they crash due to operator error.
- neals 7y ago
  That's some interesting statistics you claim, would love to see the source on that.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    Considering that mechanical failure is basically a rounding error compared to human error when it comes to causing crashes of every other vehicle and piece of machinery humans operate I'm inclined to believe the same is true for drones.
    - empath75 7y ago
      People have a much lower tolerance for mechanical failure in vehicles that carry people. Anything that crashed at a higher rate from mechanical failure than human error would not be produced for very long.
- davinic 7y ago
  You've left out the critical component between the battery and the bldc motors: the motor controller. These deal with the most difficult thermal issues and fail frequently. On a quad there a 4 motor controllers on board, and only one needs to fail, greatly increasing the odds of overall failure.
  - 7y ago
Shivetya 7y ago
My only question is, why are there no blade guards in place? Not to protect the blades but to protect anyone near this drone?
- joncrane 7y ago
  I imagine that it reduces efficiency for the fastest part of the blades to pass very close to a stationary ring, as opposed to letting the turbulence tumble off the ends of the blades unimpeded.

Invictus0 7y ago

Seems strange that Swiss Post would be the first to test out these drones, given the extremely high standard of quality that the Swiss demand. The reality is that any new technology, especially hardware, will need time to mature and work out the bugs. One crash out of 3000 isn't that bad: reality has a lot of edge cases to test for.

sytelus 7y ago
> One crash out of 3000 isn't that bad It is actually very bad. Amazon ships ~2M packages per day by one estimates. Assume only 10% of these gets drone delivered. This would translate to 66 crashes each day. If only 10% of these crashes happen on people, it would be 6 people randomly getting killed each day.
- Invictus0 7y ago
  This isn't a constant linear crash rate. Each crash creates the impetus for a more robust product generation. But in the beginning, you should expect to see things go wrong. See SpaceX for example.
  - PhilWright 7y ago
    People getting hit on the head is not acceptable whilst the technology and standards mature. A few rockets blowing up, without hurting anyone, is acceptable whilst technology matures.
    - bigiain 7y ago
      So far as I can tell - nobody has (yet?) been hit on the head with a delivery drone.
- gwicksted 7y ago
  May the odds forever be in your favor ;)
- 4ntonius8lock 7y ago

zwkrt 7y ago

I agree that this is bad, 2 crashes at relatively low volume is not great. However, I do wonder if reason will prevail in the long run with regards to overall safety and environmental impact. I recall early laws being very unfair to vehicular traffic, such as the apocryphal law that if a car startled a horse the owner should dismantle the car until the horse is no longer perturbed.

PhilWright 7y ago

Having large numbers of drones in the sky, where any failure has the potential to drop a large weight on a person seems like a show stopper. Or just crashing onto a house or car and causing damage is going to get annoying for the community real fast. I doubt drones can be made as reliable as aeroplanes at anything like a realistic price.

weddpros 7y ago
This is an emotional answer: "any failure...potential... large weight... person... show stopper". That's emotions speaking, we need probabilities and reason instead (because a delivery truck should trigger the same fear with you but it doesn't). Planes ARE the safest way to travel: maybe drones are the safest in certain conditions, like for these urgent hospital deliveries in Switzerland, or in dangerous/isolated settings. And maybe drones will become safer and safer, like with parachutes in the article. Okay the parachutes will need Dyneema strings instead of simple ones, just like parachutes were used before Dyneema was invented. Oh wait, someone's working on Dyneema parachutes for drones: https://www.textilemedia.com/latest-news/mobiletex/drone-parachute-manufactured-from-dyneema/ https://www.textilemedia.com/latest-news/mobiletex/drone-par... As you can see, there's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Find how you can save lives and make the world better, not how to use emotions to exert power and kill Freedom. The world needs innovation more than ever, be it electronic cigarettes or self driving cars or drones.
- sytelus 7y ago
  Probabilities and stats are actually incomplete and naive way people justify human deaths. Let's say you hit another car and kill another driver because you were texting. This would lead to perhaps prison, heavy fines and taking you off the road to prevent future incidence. However, cars themselves would not get banned. Now imagine the accident was because of car malfunction and not your mistake. What would happen? You guessed right: that models of cars would be taken away from the road. Now here's a thought experiment: Let's say humans have a choice of only two models of cars: A and B. Car A fails less often, kills fewer people overall but none of the failures are due to human mistake. It just speeds up randomly and uncontrollably sometimes and kills whoever is on the way. Engineers have raised their hand that this cannot be fixed for a few years. On the other hand, car B fails only when a human makes a mistake even though its statistically 10X more overall failures per year. Which car society would approve?

4ntonius8lock 7y ago

Sadly, as pointed out by Neil deGrasse Tyson, we respond to spectacle over data. How many deaths per 1,000,000,000 package delivery happen with trucks? Truck deliver is not a zero death thing. I'd even want to see truck air pollution factored in somehow. If drones have a lower %, we should view falling death boxes as acceptable. Even though it does have a strangely dystonia aspect to it.

PhilWright 7y ago
I think the difference from a psychological point of view is that getting a drone drop randomly on your head feels, well random. Therefore it does not feel like you can do much of anything to avoid it, unlikely though it would be in practice. Getting killed by a terrorist or mass killer feels equally bad because it is random. But something like sky divers getting killed does not bother me because I can avoid it, by not sky diving. Just like I can choose not to drive and so avoid almost any chance of being killed by another driver. It is the randomness and the fact you cannot avoid it that, I think, makes to less acceptable.
- weddpros 7y ago
  I personally know someone who was killed by a UPS truck on his parking lot. Don't think randomness only happens to others.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    But the example you use is exactly that: something happening to another person.
- 4ntonius8lock 7y ago
  People who don't drive don't get killed by trucks? That's news to me. I was thinking trucks get into accidents with public transportation, as well as run over pedestrians and bicyclists. The fact that it doesn't appear random doesn't mean it isn't. Getting killed by medical malpractice is also random, yet we don't really fret over our extremely error prone medical system. We don't even argue for removing doctors working 24 hour shifts, while we wouldn't allow a street sweeper to do the same.

jimmaswell 7y ago

It seems so cowardly halting progress so fast just because of two harmless crashes. There's never going to be zero risk to anything. Still much safer than cars so far.

specialp 7y ago
Progress is not necessarily halted by not having something in production. Perhaps it needs more work in testing. The article says 3000 successes/2 failures. That is too high when you have 10kg things falling out of the sky.
- rtpg 7y ago
  2 packages falling from the sky over 3000.... sounds like a higher failure rate than the current vehicle delivery mechanisms. I wonder what the score is for postal vehicles (similarly for crashes with other vehicles and the like)
twblalock 7y ago
The public has already accepted the risk of car crashes, but not the risk of drone crashes. "Safer than cars" assumes people have a purely mathematical approach to risk, but in fact people always err on the side of the status quo unless a new thing is way better. This particular drone crashed near a school -- if it had hit a child, there would be demands to ban drone deliveries, and you just know that politicians never miss an opportunity to grandstand about public safety, particularly when children are involved. It's better to back off for now, improve the drones, and try again later, because one or two bad accidents could end the entire project. We are more likely to end up with drone deliveries when the drone companies are sensitive to managing the public reaction.
- rjf72 7y ago
  I don't think it's that people's natural conservatism when it comes to technology has changed, but rather our inclination to indulge (and enforce) such conservatism on nation wide levels. If merry-go-rounds, swings, and climbing polls were not already staples of childhood play, would we allow them today? I mean a child can get quite high in a swing and fall out. He can even die. Indeed looking at the numbers just between 1990 and 2000 some 147 children < 14 years old died on playgrounds in the US alone. [1] About 45 of those deaths were on public playgrounds. Injures requiring emergency room visits are exponentially more common with the majority occurring at schools. I think the answer is a resounding no, we would not even consider allowing playgrounds today. And that's quite pitiful. Taleb wrote an interesting article on how the most intolerant within a society eventually come to determine its fate, nearly regardless of their size. [2] It may be only a few percent of society that would not allow playgrounds, but so long as these people complain loud enough - they will win. Because their aversion to any sort of risk whatsoever is unlikely to be countered by a group that happen to be equally fervent 'playground enthusiast.' And so the path of least resistance is to simply ban playgrounds. Hahah, hopefully this post doesn't give somebody the idea to go start an attention seeking social media campaign to ban playgrounds. It might very well succeed! [1] - https://www.cdc.gov/HomeandRecreationalSafety/Playground-Injuries/playgroundinjuries-factsheet.htm https://www.cdc.gov/HomeandRecreationalSafety/Playground-Inj... [2] - https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

raynr 7y ago

As an additional potential recovery mode: ETH Zurich's Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control [0] has done amazing work on quadcopter recovery after rotor control loss [1] (I believe they are down to controlled flight with only one or two rotors left, but I cannot find the link right now). I've been waiting for this to filter into the real world but have yet to see it. [0] https://idsc.ethz.ch/ https://idsc.ethz.ch/ [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek0FrCaogcs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek0FrCaogcs

rkagerer 7y ago
This is really impressive. Are the algos published / open sourced / licensable?
- nairboon 7y ago
  Here you go: https://www.flyingmachinearena.ethz.ch/wp-content/publications/2014/mueIEEE14.pdf https://www.flyingmachinearena.ethz.ch/wp-content/publicatio...

shpx 7y ago

> According to the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the 10-kg drone suffered an uncontrolled crash “in a wooded area of Zurich’s university quarter only 50 yards away from a group of playing kindergarten children.” Something tells me that a German newspaper wouldn't be using yards. Sure enough, looking at the source, it's a mistake in Google's translation model > Dass die mehr als 10 Kilogramm schwere Drohne vom Typ Matternet M2V9 in einem Waldstück des Zürcher Universitätsviertels nur rund 50 Meter entfernt von einer Gruppe spielender Kindergartenkinder zu Boden krachte, erwähnte der staatliche Logistikkonzern indes nicht. Bing translate gets it right though.

kgwgk 7y ago
That’s a fine translation, better than “only 54.68 yards away from a group of playing kindergarten children.”
- jaclaz 7y ago
  Well, to be fair the original German has "rund" in it that was lost in translation, so that would be "only approximately 50 meters", which would make the 50 yards acceptable. Probably I would have translated it as "less than 60 yards" ;-).
  - jarvic 7y ago
    Interestingly, if you remove "rund" it changes from "only 50 yards" to "just 50 meters".
jacquesm 7y ago
Yards and meters are interchangeable for news purposes, since the estimates are well within the percentage difference between a single yard and a single meter. When a news article says '100 meters from the accident' it does not imply someone used a tape measure.

alex_young 7y ago

Amazing. I can see my flat in that photo :) Anyway, I think there are a few things to point out here: This program was in place to test the efficiency of sending biological samples between hospitals quickly. I'm not entirely sure why this is a problem we need to solve. Is it really better to use drone delivery of blood samples to central hospitals than to add another testing machine at the remote location? Seems like the answer could be no. It's really weird to get a letter in the mail telling you that a blood delivery drone crashed in a lake nearby. This program seems like it's an answer in search of a problem.

erklik 7y ago
> Is it really better to use drone delivery of blood samples to central hospitals than to add another testing machine at the remote location? Could it be a case of being cheaper to use drones instead of setting up an actual lab?
jobigoud 7y ago
Wow that is another level. Now in the event of a crash there are issue related to contamination, and also personal medical information leakage. Besides crashes, another issue with autonomous vehicles traveling without passengers is going to be hijacking for payload and parts. Maybe not in Switzerland, but in the US there are already people stealing packages right on other people's properties, now they can do the same in the middle of nowhere, plus grab a large drone in the process and resell parts. Capture, cut power, disassemble, deactivate the GPS if it has its own power source, done.
anonoholic 7y ago
A lab is not just "a testing machine". Depending on the analysis being performed, you need an array specialist equipment. Then the lab has to be staffed. I imagine shipping samples to a shared facility is significantly more cost effective, otherwise it wouldn't be being trialled. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_laboratory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_laboratory
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

bayesian_horse 7y ago

Who could have guessed that falling out of the sky would be the main issue with things carrying things through the sky?

1023bytes 7y ago

Delivery drones are definitely unnecessary in densely populated areas. It's cool and futuristic, but it's not economical at all, it's very unsafe and also loud. However it's a wonderful thing for rural places with poor infrastructure. For example Zipline in Rwanda, one of the most interesting solutions an engineering perspective too: https://youtube.com/watch?v=jEbRVNxL44c https://youtube.com/watch?v=jEbRVNxL44c

lazyjones 7y ago

This was posted a few days ago when it was "news": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20590407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20590407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20563123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20563123 It's really odd sometimes how duplicate, late posts get more comments and upvotes than the original. Perhaps the time of posting is too important.

nairboon 7y ago

> This is the first time we had a failure on the vehicle’s parachute system. Doesn't this mean that neither Matternet nor the Swiss Post tested the failure modes of this drone enough? If it never happened before, they didn't test it enough to get any estimate for a MTBF for this particular part. But this is to be expected from the Swiss Post, they do sloppy work and blame others, just read their dementi: >As such, we have asked Matternet to implement various urgent measures: >[...]The shrill whistle, which alerts people near the drone when it is making an emergency landing, will be made louder. The whistle couldn't be heard in that accident... Sound like somebody didn't test a single emergency landing in that forest and asked the numerous strollers whether they have heard anything

ekianjo 7y ago

One thing I don't understand is, why are they doing live testing above inhabited areas? Until the tech is proven, the only right thing to do is to implement drones routes that avoid populated areas as much as possible, or at least go thru very sparsely populated areas by default, until all failure modes are well understood.

Leherenn 7y ago
They didn't, it happened over a forest. Many people seem to think it happened near a kindergarten, but that's not the case, it just happened that kindergarten-aged kids were playing in the area. You can find everything in the report (in German) https://www.sust.admin.ch/inhalte/AV-berichte/ZB_SUI-9903.pdf https://www.sust.admin.ch/inhalte/AV-berichte/ZB_SUI-9903.pd... Just enter the coordinates of the crash in Google map, you can see there's no school around.
- ekianjo 7y ago
  Thanks, then the article was confusing on that particular point.

jamisteven 7y ago

Zipline seems to be the more like successor in this field. https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/drones/zipline-emphasizes-safety-with-its-delivery-drones-in-preparation-for-us-operations https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/drones/zipline-...

rkachowski 7y ago

This says ~3000 successful flights with 2 crashes - how many road incidents per journey does a standard mail truck encouter? Is 1500 trips a low / mid / high figure with regards to collisions?

liability 7y ago
That's an over-simplified analysis. With road accidents, people have reasonable expectations that certain behaviors can reduce their personal risk of being killed in an accident. For instance, that average includes people who drove drunk, run redlights, drive during ice storms, etc. By avoiding these activities an individual can reduce their personal risk dramatically below the national average. Not to mention I can virtually eliminate any possibility of dying in a traffic accident by remaining in my backyard, where I might still be struck in the head by a delivery drone. What risky behaviours am I meant to avoid there, being outside? You should instead compare the risk somebody following reasonable safety precautions would have in each scenario.
saalweachter 7y ago
The USPS has ~30,000 motor vehicle accidents per year. The entire USPS fleet travels ~1.28B miles / year, with the LLVs traveling 764M miles. The LLVs travel about 18 miles per day, 300 days per year, which gives you an estimated 43 million LLV trips per year. Assuming all 30,000 motor vehicle accidents are LLVs, that amounts to 1 accident every 1433 LLV trips. Of course, on each LLV "trip", it delivers letters and parcels to hundreds of addresses; each drone delivery is presumably one. (The USPS also averages 1 accident every ~43,000 miles; this is significantly above the US average of 1 accident per 165,000 miles driven. I would assume the increased rate is (1) USPS vehicles drive slow and stop frequently along their routes; I would guess many accidents are other vehicles driving too fast and trying to pass in unsafe areas (2) distracted driving; drivers are performing other tasks eg retrieving the next addresses mail while driving and (3) every USPS accident is likely reported; drivers are responsible for the condition of their vehicle and small fender-benders that we might not report are likely included in USPS statistics.)
- petra 7y ago

Down_n_Out 7y ago

I really don't get the hacker news algorithms on these posts, I've submitted this interesting article 7 days ago [0] and there was no interest (which is fine, that's not the issue). I guess 7 days is the cut-off then? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20563123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20563123

benkarst 7y ago

2 crashes. I didn't see the article mention how many successful deliveries there have been.

JetSpiegel 7y ago

Why has IEEE Spectrum turned their nice HTML blog into a site that requires JS to read?