15 ms·

Stanford lab envisions delivery drones that save energy by taking the bus

194 points by amaajemyfren 6y ago

sdan 6y ago
A drone utilizing current infrastructure like cars or busses would make sense (last-mile delivery would be slower, but you could go long distances).
pjmorris 6y ago
I've been joking for awhile now that UPS/FedEx trucks could become 'aircraft carriers', carrying a set of drones along with the packages, using the drones for the 'last mile' of delivery.
- hliyan 6y ago
  That's actually a great idea. I don't know why it hasn't been tried out (or if it has, why it didn't work out).
  - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
    Probably issues with charging. Super capacitor based drones would probably be the best outcome (if we could figure out how to harness the power)
    - pjmorris 6y ago
      Charging issues: The trucks could carry spare batteries and chargers.
    - jandrese 6y ago
      If the drones spend a decent amount of time on the truck it doesn't need anything too exotic. You will need to outfit the trucks with beefy alternators/gensets though. There are still several issues with this scheme. The drone needs to be autonomous enough to know when to take off, which partially involves knowing the trucks current and future route information. It also needs to be able to navigate safely in low level flight to the destination, and be able to safely drop the package off. The original prototype delivery required homeowners to build a small helipad in their back yard to get packages, which is impractical. The drone then needs to be able to fly back to the truck, knowing exactly where the truck is and where it will be in a few minutes and possibly land on a moving vehicle with enough precision to hook up the charging system and somehow select and attach the next package for delivery. When you look into the details this is a horrendously complex system. Some of the tech isn't really there yet and the rest requires a whole elephant load of integration and testing. There are loads of things that can go wrong. The truck might get diverted around roadwork, or be in an accident, or there could be kids playing in the yard when the drone arrives with the package and nowhere safe to land, territorial birds may attack the drone, or the battery pack on the drone might fail and catch fire, a no-fly NOTAM may appear suddenly over your delivery area, or so on and so forth.
- foobarian 6y ago
  That's how the Protoss Postal Service does it! Joking aside when Amazon's drone program first made news I thought they were going to make a deal with USPS to use the gazillion post office offices as drone bases. Guess it never went anywhere.
  - VectorLock 6y ago
    Lots of broad flat roofs on Whole Foods.
  - rtkwe 6y ago
    USPS is legally blocked from offering any services besides postal services, one of the reasons they're doing so bad among many, and this seems vaguely delivery but outside the bounds.
    - nodrones123 6y ago
      That’s not true at all. USPS offers notary services, passport services, money orders, and many other services besides. The reason USPS is having financial troubles is because conservative extremists in the American government have put huge financial burdens on them like fully funding their medical plan 10 years in advance in a blatant attempt at bankrupting one of the few Federal agencies specifically enumerated in the Constitution so they can then sell this services to FedEx and UPS and make huge gains for shareholders.
      - muststopmyths 6y ago
        It's actually a requirement to fund 75 years of retirement costs in 10 years ($75 billion). And it was passed with broad bipartisan support. I wish people would stop repeating the canard about "conservative extremists" with respect to this law. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/15/postal-service-bailout-congress/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/15/postal-se...
        karpierz 6y ago
- creaghpatr 6y ago
  That's a really cool idea.
- 0xffff2 6y ago
  That's always been one of the primary plans for package delivery...
- garrettgrimsley 6y ago
  This was my truck on Monday. Where should we put these dozens(?) of drones? https://imgur.com/a/wBn2Pfh https://imgur.com/a/wBn2Pfh That amount of packages is not extraordinary, and in my car was more full today. I’m on lunch now, 166 stops down, 42 stops to go.
  - WhompingWindows 6y ago
    How many of the packages are smaller than a shoebox? How many are lighter than 5 pounds? Could drones doing this from a specialized place on top of the van save you some stops?
    - garrettgrimsley 6y ago
      Plenty, and I see where you’re coming from, but in the end the amount of work would increase to fill any saved labor.
- Fabricio20 6y ago
  That's exactly what patent US9305280B1 [0] from Amazon describes! I personally think this could work particularly well, maybe not with blimps but with trucks doing optimized routes and deploying drones for the last mile. [0] https://patents.google.com/patent/US9305280B1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US9305280B1/en
pdimitar 6y ago
Any such solution, while environmentally-friendly and laudible, must take into account possible attack by humans on the way (including in the bus).
- jansan 6y ago
  And by monkeys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBN1bdR_LLs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBN1bdR_LLs
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- notatoad 6y ago
  but remember that "taking into account" does not necessarily mean "make impossible". yes, humans can attack drones. but humans can also attack postal carriers, or steal packages off porches. neither of those facts seem to be disqualifiers for continuing with the current system. Some level of theft will always happen, and the cost of that theft needs to be factored into the overall cost of the system. if that cost is too high, it can make the system untenable, but eliminating the possibility of theft is not a realistic goal for any delivery system.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    > if that cost is too high, it can make the system untenable That's what I mean. If postal service workers and their trucks get abducted / stolen once every 10-20 deliveries then that would make the postal delivery system untenable as well. :D It's a little bit apples to oranges here. While in the classic systems you can only get the good stolen, here we're talking stealing the good and the delivery system with it.
jansan 6y ago
Just imaging, every car has a landing platform on the roof. A centralized traffic system knows the destination of each car. Drones can just jump cars, and if there is no car going in the right direction, lift off and finish the rest of route themselves.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- saluki 6y ago
  The first stepping stone is probably drones based on UPS and FedEx trucks helping by making small package deliveries while the driver is dropping off packages in each neighborhood. This was from a few years ago. https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/21/ups-tests-show-delivery-drones-still-need-work/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/21/ups-tests-show-delivery-dr...
  - chasd00 6y ago
    just using drones do deliver from the truck to the door without the driver having to get out would probably double delivery capacity.
- adrianmonk 6y ago
  One could imagine you could sign up just by opting in on your navigation app. However, I think practically speaking, I don't want the roof of my car damaged, so there would have to be some capital cost to create some kind of roof protector landing pad thing. So that might limit adoption. On the other hand, if I drove a pickup truck, I wouldn't care. I would opt in without any changes to my vehicle. I would just need to make sure the bed is empty.
Traubenfuchs 6y ago
A new age of humans and machines having to share public infrastructure. Animatrix, here we come!
jcims 6y ago
A commercial delivery drone carrying a six pound package landing on top of a bus between tall buildings is going to make a ridiculous discordant growl. Six of them coming and going within a quarter mile at any given time are going to sound like an auto-tuned pack of hounds from hell. (This of course is ignoring what happens if something fucks up and suddenly it has 1/8th of a second to decide to fly out of it or brake those giant swinging carbon fiber blades before they encounter human flesh. It's like a trolley problem on a trolley.). No way. (IMHO of course) (e.g Video of a Matrice 600 with a payload of ~8lbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jayVMmvLxOA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jayVMmvLxOA Even better, 25 lbs from 60' up lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jULQrdUTngM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jULQrdUTngM )
- dntbnmpls 6y ago
  > Even better, 25 lbs from 60' up lol Oddly terrifying. Could be a trailer to a new horror film - The Drone Chainsaw Massacres.
- joekrill 6y ago
  Is anyone working on solving the noise problem with drones? Is it even really solvable in any realistic way? What would it take to have a "silent" drone?
  - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    Lots can be done, but at the expense of fuel efficiency.
    - buzzkillington 6y ago
      Which is much less of a problem when you can charge the drones from a carrier.
  - adamsea 6y ago
    Our drones need a blimp mode : ) :)
dmos62 6y ago
Imagine a world in which we don't need individual cars, because public transport is sufficient; passengers and cargo are pooled into compartments; compartments pooled and unpooled mid-trip as needed to maximize total efficiency; where traffic runs underground and on a rail where that makes sense; where stations can be very large or very small based on traffic; where the economics of laying out the tunnels is such that it makes sense to build small stations; where car roads are a rarity; where safety is not relient on human judgment, skill or reaction time; where transportation is not dependent on fossil fuels. Aah, those things are pleasant to imagine.
- chasd00 6y ago
  then imagine when politics declares reason to turn it off and everyone is basically trapped. Maybe a global pandemic or something...
- einpoklum 6y ago
  > Imagine a world in which we don't need individual cars, because public transport is sufficient This is already true when you augment public transport with bike lanes, cheap or public bicycles, and slow narrow vehicles for the movement-impaired which can go on bike lanes. ... that is, in many cities in the world, especially in Europe. The Netherlands is particularly good in this respect.
- gonzo41 6y ago
  Or, Imagine where we toll everyone daily who get's on a highway in a car, and instead provide sheltered lanes for bicycles. And those bikes are simple sturdy steel bikes with wire cage panniers and can hold a ton. And in this utopian world a lot of health related issues are reduced because of the incidental exercise that people get on commuting around.
  - dmos62 6y ago
    True. Once you get rid of cars, the world is a bicycle lane.
  - ajuc 6y ago
abuk11 6y ago
Why does the leisure class get funding for this nonsense? An y new "invention" either seems to spy on people or annoy the hell out of them. Drones are a visual nuisance and produce noise. Do you want to disturb bus riders and residential areas. The Silicon Valley episode where a Stanford lab produced a robotic deer that is completely useless but caused a road accident is reality. I hope people will react like Erlich Bachman when these drones become a thing.
- avs733 6y ago
  and commodify and exploit social resources for profit?
- dmos62 6y ago
  Do delivery cars, scooters, trucks not produce noise? Is this a complaint about delivery drones or delivery? Tracking technology will always be at our fingertips. I don't think you'd want a world where that wasn't true. It's governmental regulation that's the answer to large scale abuse.
  - OrangeMango 6y ago
    > Do delivery cars, scooters, trucks not produce noise? There are a lot of existing laws about aircraft noise that cars, trucks and scooters don't need to worry about. And once you reach a certain number of takeoffs and landings your "airport" falls under additional regulations that require things like permanent noise monitoring and paying money for noise abatement for nearby property owners. In my state, any citizen can file a public nuisance suit for unreasonable noise that interferes with quality of life. With trucks, cars and scooters it is perhaps a little difficult to track and attribute noise sources. One company making thousands of drone deliveries makes for a very easy target.
    - mattkrause 6y ago
      And there are separate laws for cars and truck noise too. * California limits exhaust noise to 95 dBa: http://www.californiacarlaws.com/exhaust-noise/ http://www.californiacarlaws.com/exhaust-noise/ * Colorado has a subjective standard "prevent any excessive or unusual noise" https://law.justia.com/codes/colorado/2016/title-42/regulation-of-vehicles-and-traffic/article-4/part-2/section-42-4-225/ https://law.justia.com/codes/colorado/2016/title-42/regulati... * Connecticut has a pretty complicated scheme depending on the vehicle's weight and age, as well as the road surface: https://www.cga.ct.gov/2009/rpt/2009-R-0205.htm https://www.cga.ct.gov/2009/rpt/2009-R-0205.htm * Delaware has a subjective standard: "muffler in good working order and in accordance with manufacturer's specifications and in constant operation to prevent excessive or unusual noise." https://law.justia.com/codes/delaware/2015/title-21/chapter-43/subchapter-i/section-4311/ https://law.justia.com/codes/delaware/2015/title-21/chapter-... There are, of course, laws about other sources of noise too. Ask any college kid.
op03 6y ago
Cool idea. Maybe Uber et al can also take part in this - rent out roof space on their fleet heading in same direction as the drone...
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Or, run special carts up and down main drags for drones to hitch rides (and perhaps charge while riding?). Instead of combining them with human transport, to the detriment of both humans and drones.
lowdose 6y ago
There is a youtube video at the start of the article with a presentation of the system. A simulation is shown on the map of SF. https://youtu.be/2U8jI-n9Ulk https://youtu.be/2U8jI-n9Ulk
- pastage 6y ago
  This is more about route finding than anything else. One hour of CPU time to calculate routes for 5000 packages and 30 distribution centers. That's pretty good.
jpm_sd 6y ago
I'm still holding out hope for ballistic delivery from UP/Ex launchers, as envisioned by Vernor Vinge in Rainbow's End. A solid fling and a guided parachute might actually work. Major airspace sharing concerns, of course.
- chasd00 6y ago
  in the high power rocketry hobby it can be a very long walk ( over a mile ) to retrieve your rocket after a parachute landing. Here's a GPS guided parachute that fly's back to the launch pad. I don't believe it made it to production but it's very cool https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ac-VFPAqIo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ac-VFPAqIo
  - pythonaut_16 6y ago
    I wonder if you could use a retrieval drone (depending on the size of the rocket). Either by remote control or GPS on the rocket, fly over to pick up the rocket with some kind of mechanical claw.
    - asdff 6y ago
      Don't use the one in the skill cranes...
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  >as envisioned by Vernor Vinge in Rainbow's End. A solid fling and a guided parachute might actually work. Major airspace sharing concerns, of course. No need to go that high at least initially or even use parachutes. Just mount your system that lobs packages on a truck. It just drives a route and some software lobs everything where/when needed. Use a special sticker that's reflective in a particular spectrum for the truck to target and give the stickers out for free. Have the truck scan for the stickers, record gps coordinates (so you know which addresses are deliverable with your new system) and scan for obstacles so you can compute potential firing angle (too low and you're in the shrubs, too high and you're in the power lines or tree branches) as it drives around. Once you know the potential firing arcs for a supported address you can calculate what packages can be delivered without going too high/low or over/under shooting. Even if the truck has to stop to shoot it's still a labor saving improvement over traditional delivery and the sound of a low pressure pneumatic cannon isn't any louder than a truck door. You could use existing warehouse infrastructure to make sure that packages that are not of the right density (or are market in your system as too fragile)to safely toss don't wind up getting tossed. You're basically just using software and data input to replace the judgement of the paper boy (hard) and some powered rollers and actuators to replace his arm hard (easy). Disclaimer: I spend 3min thinking about this, this is by no means a serious pitch.
nodrones123 6y ago
This is a terrible idea. Taxpayers pay for the fuel in that bus, the maintenance of that bus, and the roads it rides on. We’re not funding that so Jeff Bezos can add another hundred million to his pocket tax free. This is bullshit. If delivery companies want to profit off the public transportation system, they should be paying into said system. Especially if their new plan to deliver their goods is designed to undermine and circumvent the US Postal Service, another taxpayer funded delivery system.
- xwdv 6y ago
  Bike couriers already can jump on buses with their packages to save on time and energy. Not a new concept.
  - mayama 6y ago
    Bike couriers will be paying when they hop on bus. Drone operators also have to consider how to pay, of course after evaluating if this approach is legal in the first place.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- adrianmonk 6y ago
  Your objection seems to be based on an implicit assumption that the drones would ride for free. I don't see any reason to believe it would happen that way. What public transit agency would ever agree to that? To me, it seems like a more reasonable assumption is that the drone operators would pay the transit agencies money. Since the buses are already going on those routes, the marginal cost for the transit agency should be nearly zero, so it should be easy to make a profit. So this seems like a good way for transit agencies to increase their funding with little downside.
  - vulcan01 6y ago
    Increasing the transit agencies' funding would also lead to less taxes...
curiousgal 6y ago
What a stupid idea.
ravenstine 6y ago
Why stop at buses? Why not have drones land on self-driving cars that integrate with Bluetooth? Never mind the noise; we'll design the cars such they output the inverse frequencies being output by the drones, canceling out their sound. Even better, the drones can be designed to look like pies.
samkater 6y ago
When I saw the title, I thought this was brilliant! But I thought they meant a "drone" more like these: https://www.starship.xyz/ https://www.starship.xyz/. (Turns out google responds better to searching for robots when looking those up). A ground robot would alleviate a lot of the concerns about noise and other problems with urban air travel.
CommieBobDole 6y ago
Perhaps we could load all the packages into some sort of specialized "package bus", and the driver could drive it around town all day on an optimized route and carry the packages to the customer's door himself. Joking aside, that does raise the idea of using a delivery truck as sort of a carrier for rechargable drones; truck drives around, packages are automatically distributed to a pool of drones who handle the last hundred yards of delivery and return to the truck to reload/recharge.
- dimatura 6y ago
  That's exactly the idea. Drones are relatively energy-efficient and are ill-suited for long range transport, specially if they have to haul a package. But for "last mile" delivery it might make sense.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  I thought that was one of Amazon's proposed delivery drone schemes before it got a sad but sensibly justifiable veto over concerns of the air space being filled with a high volume of drones whom would constitute a real falling hazard from the base failure rate and an attractive nuisance by being small non-human "faceless" targets with goods. Technically anybody right now could just shoot a poor Amazon delivery drivers with a shotgun now to rob them but it would be murder as opposed to destruction of property. Very few would do so vs snaring or shooting a drone. It is one hell of a bizzare systemic perverse incentive - putting a human body to be at risk reduces the robbery incentive and frequency. Reminds me of one account of Italian medieval cities of merchants plastering their walls with the Virgin Mary so people wouldn't dare to blasphemously piss on her image.
  - zitterbewegung 6y ago
    For this even if you automate the driving and package delivery you would still want a human to be onsite to make sure the system doesn’t fail. It would make the amount of delivery trucks smaller making shipments more efficient .
  - Threeve303 6y ago
aylmao 6y ago
I do wonder if drone delivery will take off (heh). A lot has been said about the disadvantages, but one also has to also wonder about the advantages. There's a point at which things are "good enough", and small improvements aren't really worth the costs. How much time would using drones for the last couple kilometers save? A few hours? Local delivery trucks tend to make rounds every day, so it really does seem like the maximum amount of time drone delivery could save is one day. Will the cost of operating this (not only monetary, but also organizational, and in terms of noise pollution, drone repair, the occasional package/drone lost, etc) be worth the whole one day faster delivery to customers? This, especially considering drones can't deliver everything, so trucks would have to keep operating. Truck's are large— economically what makes sense is to have them full of packages and with a whole-day schedule. Would drone usage offset enough deliveries to cut a few truck routes? Would they be enough to make it all worth? A lot of questions in the air (heh).
WheelsAtLarge 6y ago
Ok,this is sort of brilliant in it's simplicity and ability to use existing resources. A while back i read an article that theorized that there would be cars all over carrying drones and cars would do most of the transportation while the drones did the last mile or so. Here is a practical example.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
And periodically the bus will swish its trolley pole and all the drones will lift off in a cloud and buzz around and then resettle.
cwkoss 6y ago
I don't understand why the default assumption is that delivery drones need to fly. It seems like you could have a bus-ful of small wheeled drones that could achieve many of the benefits with much fewer safety concerns. Would need to make a package lockbox similar to a mailbox that is accessible by the dronecars, but I think in this day and age of frequent package theft, many would go along with it.
- orblivion 6y ago
  Maybe they can be amphibious too!
- notatoad 6y ago
  >Would need to make a package lockbox similar to a mailbox that is accessible by the dronecars at this point, you can almost get rid of the whole last-mile problem that you're trying to solve with the drones, and the delivery truck can just drop off pre-filled lockboxes roadside.
- asdff 6y ago
  they have these delivering food in santa monica. there are attendants not far away, though, which sort of defeats the purpose imo.
schaefer 6y ago
so, I'm a rock climber, and I'd never go into the mountains without a helmet. because falling objects to the head kill. What are people even thinking, mixing spaces for humans with our fragile little egg heads and corporate swarms of falling death blocks? hmm...
NicoJuicy 6y ago
This is actually quite genius
cerved 6y ago
Here's the actual paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.11840.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.11840.pdf Here's the code: https://github.com/sisl/MultiAgentAllocationTransit.jl https://github.com/sisl/MultiAgentAllocationTransit.jl Much more interesting that some sensationalist "Wow, AI drones are taking the bus" piece

194 points by amaajemyfren 6y ago

sdan 6y ago

A drone utilizing current infrastructure like cars or busses would make sense (last-mile delivery would be slower, but you could go long distances).

pjmorris 6y ago

I've been joking for awhile now that UPS/FedEx trucks could become 'aircraft carriers', carrying a set of drones along with the packages, using the drones for the 'last mile' of delivery.

hliyan 6y ago
That's actually a great idea. I don't know why it hasn't been tried out (or if it has, why it didn't work out).
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
  Probably issues with charging. Super capacitor based drones would probably be the best outcome (if we could figure out how to harness the power)
  - pjmorris 6y ago
    Charging issues: The trucks could carry spare batteries and chargers.
  - jandrese 6y ago
    If the drones spend a decent amount of time on the truck it doesn't need anything too exotic. You will need to outfit the trucks with beefy alternators/gensets though. There are still several issues with this scheme. The drone needs to be autonomous enough to know when to take off, which partially involves knowing the trucks current and future route information. It also needs to be able to navigate safely in low level flight to the destination, and be able to safely drop the package off. The original prototype delivery required homeowners to build a small helipad in their back yard to get packages, which is impractical. The drone then needs to be able to fly back to the truck, knowing exactly where the truck is and where it will be in a few minutes and possibly land on a moving vehicle with enough precision to hook up the charging system and somehow select and attach the next package for delivery. When you look into the details this is a horrendously complex system. Some of the tech isn't really there yet and the rest requires a whole elephant load of integration and testing. There are loads of things that can go wrong. The truck might get diverted around roadwork, or be in an accident, or there could be kids playing in the yard when the drone arrives with the package and nowhere safe to land, territorial birds may attack the drone, or the battery pack on the drone might fail and catch fire, a no-fly NOTAM may appear suddenly over your delivery area, or so on and so forth.
foobarian 6y ago
That's how the Protoss Postal Service does it! Joking aside when Amazon's drone program first made news I thought they were going to make a deal with USPS to use the gazillion post office offices as drone bases. Guess it never went anywhere.
- VectorLock 6y ago
  Lots of broad flat roofs on Whole Foods.
- rtkwe 6y ago
  USPS is legally blocked from offering any services besides postal services, one of the reasons they're doing so bad among many, and this seems vaguely delivery but outside the bounds.
  - nodrones123 6y ago
    That’s not true at all. USPS offers notary services, passport services, money orders, and many other services besides. The reason USPS is having financial troubles is because conservative extremists in the American government have put huge financial burdens on them like fully funding their medical plan 10 years in advance in a blatant attempt at bankrupting one of the few Federal agencies specifically enumerated in the Constitution so they can then sell this services to FedEx and UPS and make huge gains for shareholders.
    - muststopmyths 6y ago
      It's actually a requirement to fund 75 years of retirement costs in 10 years ($75 billion). And it was passed with broad bipartisan support. I wish people would stop repeating the canard about "conservative extremists" with respect to this law. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/15/postal-service-bailout-congress/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/15/postal-se...
      - karpierz 6y ago
creaghpatr 6y ago
That's a really cool idea.
0xffff2 6y ago
That's always been one of the primary plans for package delivery...
garrettgrimsley 6y ago
This was my truck on Monday. Where should we put these dozens(?) of drones? https://imgur.com/a/wBn2Pfh https://imgur.com/a/wBn2Pfh That amount of packages is not extraordinary, and in my car was more full today. I’m on lunch now, 166 stops down, 42 stops to go.
- WhompingWindows 6y ago
  How many of the packages are smaller than a shoebox? How many are lighter than 5 pounds? Could drones doing this from a specialized place on top of the van save you some stops?
  - garrettgrimsley 6y ago
    Plenty, and I see where you’re coming from, but in the end the amount of work would increase to fill any saved labor.
Fabricio20 6y ago
That's exactly what patent US9305280B1 [0] from Amazon describes! I personally think this could work particularly well, maybe not with blimps but with trucks doing optimized routes and deploying drones for the last mile. [0] https://patents.google.com/patent/US9305280B1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US9305280B1/en

pdimitar 6y ago

Any such solution, while environmentally-friendly and laudible, must take into account possible attack by humans on the way (including in the bus).

jansan 6y ago
And by monkeys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBN1bdR_LLs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBN1bdR_LLs
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
notatoad 6y ago
but remember that "taking into account" does not necessarily mean "make impossible". yes, humans can attack drones. but humans can also attack postal carriers, or steal packages off porches. neither of those facts seem to be disqualifiers for continuing with the current system. Some level of theft will always happen, and the cost of that theft needs to be factored into the overall cost of the system. if that cost is too high, it can make the system untenable, but eliminating the possibility of theft is not a realistic goal for any delivery system.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  > if that cost is too high, it can make the system untenable That's what I mean. If postal service workers and their trucks get abducted / stolen once every 10-20 deliveries then that would make the postal delivery system untenable as well. :D It's a little bit apples to oranges here. While in the classic systems you can only get the good stolen, here we're talking stealing the good and the delivery system with it.

jansan 6y ago

Just imaging, every car has a landing platform on the roof. A centralized traffic system knows the destination of each car. Drones can just jump cars, and if there is no car going in the right direction, lift off and finish the rest of route themselves.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
saluki 6y ago
The first stepping stone is probably drones based on UPS and FedEx trucks helping by making small package deliveries while the driver is dropping off packages in each neighborhood. This was from a few years ago. https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/21/ups-tests-show-delivery-drones-still-need-work/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/21/ups-tests-show-delivery-dr...
- chasd00 6y ago
  just using drones do deliver from the truck to the door without the driver having to get out would probably double delivery capacity.
adrianmonk 6y ago
One could imagine you could sign up just by opting in on your navigation app. However, I think practically speaking, I don't want the roof of my car damaged, so there would have to be some capital cost to create some kind of roof protector landing pad thing. So that might limit adoption. On the other hand, if I drove a pickup truck, I wouldn't care. I would opt in without any changes to my vehicle. I would just need to make sure the bed is empty.

Traubenfuchs 6y ago

A new age of humans and machines having to share public infrastructure. Animatrix, here we come!

jcims 6y ago

A commercial delivery drone carrying a six pound package landing on top of a bus between tall buildings is going to make a ridiculous discordant growl. Six of them coming and going within a quarter mile at any given time are going to sound like an auto-tuned pack of hounds from hell. (This of course is ignoring what happens if something fucks up and suddenly it has 1/8th of a second to decide to fly out of it or brake those giant swinging carbon fiber blades before they encounter human flesh. It's like a trolley problem on a trolley.). No way. (IMHO of course) (e.g Video of a Matrice 600 with a payload of ~8lbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jayVMmvLxOA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jayVMmvLxOA Even better, 25 lbs from 60' up lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jULQrdUTngM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jULQrdUTngM )

dntbnmpls 6y ago
> Even better, 25 lbs from 60' up lol Oddly terrifying. Could be a trailer to a new horror film - The Drone Chainsaw Massacres.
joekrill 6y ago
Is anyone working on solving the noise problem with drones? Is it even really solvable in any realistic way? What would it take to have a "silent" drone?
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  Lots can be done, but at the expense of fuel efficiency.
  - buzzkillington 6y ago
    Which is much less of a problem when you can charge the drones from a carrier.
- adamsea 6y ago
  Our drones need a blimp mode : ) :)

dmos62 6y ago

Imagine a world in which we don't need individual cars, because public transport is sufficient; passengers and cargo are pooled into compartments; compartments pooled and unpooled mid-trip as needed to maximize total efficiency; where traffic runs underground and on a rail where that makes sense; where stations can be very large or very small based on traffic; where the economics of laying out the tunnels is such that it makes sense to build small stations; where car roads are a rarity; where safety is not relient on human judgment, skill or reaction time; where transportation is not dependent on fossil fuels. Aah, those things are pleasant to imagine.

chasd00 6y ago
then imagine when politics declares reason to turn it off and everyone is basically trapped. Maybe a global pandemic or something...
einpoklum 6y ago
> Imagine a world in which we don't need individual cars, because public transport is sufficient This is already true when you augment public transport with bike lanes, cheap or public bicycles, and slow narrow vehicles for the movement-impaired which can go on bike lanes. ... that is, in many cities in the world, especially in Europe. The Netherlands is particularly good in this respect.
gonzo41 6y ago
Or, Imagine where we toll everyone daily who get's on a highway in a car, and instead provide sheltered lanes for bicycles. And those bikes are simple sturdy steel bikes with wire cage panniers and can hold a ton. And in this utopian world a lot of health related issues are reduced because of the incidental exercise that people get on commuting around.
- dmos62 6y ago
  True. Once you get rid of cars, the world is a bicycle lane.
- ajuc 6y ago

abuk11 6y ago

Why does the leisure class get funding for this nonsense? An y new "invention" either seems to spy on people or annoy the hell out of them. Drones are a visual nuisance and produce noise. Do you want to disturb bus riders and residential areas. The Silicon Valley episode where a Stanford lab produced a robotic deer that is completely useless but caused a road accident is reality. I hope people will react like Erlich Bachman when these drones become a thing.

avs733 6y ago
and commodify and exploit social resources for profit?
dmos62 6y ago
Do delivery cars, scooters, trucks not produce noise? Is this a complaint about delivery drones or delivery? Tracking technology will always be at our fingertips. I don't think you'd want a world where that wasn't true. It's governmental regulation that's the answer to large scale abuse.
- OrangeMango 6y ago
  > Do delivery cars, scooters, trucks not produce noise? There are a lot of existing laws about aircraft noise that cars, trucks and scooters don't need to worry about. And once you reach a certain number of takeoffs and landings your "airport" falls under additional regulations that require things like permanent noise monitoring and paying money for noise abatement for nearby property owners. In my state, any citizen can file a public nuisance suit for unreasonable noise that interferes with quality of life. With trucks, cars and scooters it is perhaps a little difficult to track and attribute noise sources. One company making thousands of drone deliveries makes for a very easy target.
  - mattkrause 6y ago
    And there are separate laws for cars and truck noise too. * California limits exhaust noise to 95 dBa: http://www.californiacarlaws.com/exhaust-noise/ http://www.californiacarlaws.com/exhaust-noise/ * Colorado has a subjective standard "prevent any excessive or unusual noise" https://law.justia.com/codes/colorado/2016/title-42/regulation-of-vehicles-and-traffic/article-4/part-2/section-42-4-225/ https://law.justia.com/codes/colorado/2016/title-42/regulati... * Connecticut has a pretty complicated scheme depending on the vehicle's weight and age, as well as the road surface: https://www.cga.ct.gov/2009/rpt/2009-R-0205.htm https://www.cga.ct.gov/2009/rpt/2009-R-0205.htm * Delaware has a subjective standard: "muffler in good working order and in accordance with manufacturer's specifications and in constant operation to prevent excessive or unusual noise." https://law.justia.com/codes/delaware/2015/title-21/chapter-43/subchapter-i/section-4311/ https://law.justia.com/codes/delaware/2015/title-21/chapter-... There are, of course, laws about other sources of noise too. Ask any college kid.

op03 6y ago

Cool idea. Maybe Uber et al can also take part in this - rent out roof space on their fleet heading in same direction as the drone...

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

Or, run special carts up and down main drags for drones to hitch rides (and perhaps charge while riding?). Instead of combining them with human transport, to the detriment of both humans and drones.

lowdose 6y ago

There is a youtube video at the start of the article with a presentation of the system. A simulation is shown on the map of SF. https://youtu.be/2U8jI-n9Ulk https://youtu.be/2U8jI-n9Ulk

pastage 6y ago
This is more about route finding than anything else. One hour of CPU time to calculate routes for 5000 packages and 30 distribution centers. That's pretty good.

jpm_sd 6y ago

I'm still holding out hope for ballistic delivery from UP/Ex launchers, as envisioned by Vernor Vinge in Rainbow's End. A solid fling and a guided parachute might actually work. Major airspace sharing concerns, of course.

chasd00 6y ago
in the high power rocketry hobby it can be a very long walk ( over a mile ) to retrieve your rocket after a parachute landing. Here's a GPS guided parachute that fly's back to the launch pad. I don't believe it made it to production but it's very cool https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ac-VFPAqIo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ac-VFPAqIo
- pythonaut_16 6y ago
  I wonder if you could use a retrieval drone (depending on the size of the rocket). Either by remote control or GPS on the rocket, fly over to pick up the rocket with some kind of mechanical claw.
  - asdff 6y ago
    Don't use the one in the skill cranes...
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>as envisioned by Vernor Vinge in Rainbow's End. A solid fling and a guided parachute might actually work. Major airspace sharing concerns, of course. No need to go that high at least initially or even use parachutes. Just mount your system that lobs packages on a truck. It just drives a route and some software lobs everything where/when needed. Use a special sticker that's reflective in a particular spectrum for the truck to target and give the stickers out for free. Have the truck scan for the stickers, record gps coordinates (so you know which addresses are deliverable with your new system) and scan for obstacles so you can compute potential firing angle (too low and you're in the shrubs, too high and you're in the power lines or tree branches) as it drives around. Once you know the potential firing arcs for a supported address you can calculate what packages can be delivered without going too high/low or over/under shooting. Even if the truck has to stop to shoot it's still a labor saving improvement over traditional delivery and the sound of a low pressure pneumatic cannon isn't any louder than a truck door. You could use existing warehouse infrastructure to make sure that packages that are not of the right density (or are market in your system as too fragile)to safely toss don't wind up getting tossed. You're basically just using software and data input to replace the judgement of the paper boy (hard) and some powered rollers and actuators to replace his arm hard (easy). Disclaimer: I spend 3min thinking about this, this is by no means a serious pitch.

nodrones123 6y ago

This is a terrible idea. Taxpayers pay for the fuel in that bus, the maintenance of that bus, and the roads it rides on. We’re not funding that so Jeff Bezos can add another hundred million to his pocket tax free. This is bullshit. If delivery companies want to profit off the public transportation system, they should be paying into said system. Especially if their new plan to deliver their goods is designed to undermine and circumvent the US Postal Service, another taxpayer funded delivery system.

xwdv 6y ago
Bike couriers already can jump on buses with their packages to save on time and energy. Not a new concept.
- mayama 6y ago
  Bike couriers will be paying when they hop on bus. Drone operators also have to consider how to pay, of course after evaluating if this approach is legal in the first place.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
adrianmonk 6y ago
Your objection seems to be based on an implicit assumption that the drones would ride for free. I don't see any reason to believe it would happen that way. What public transit agency would ever agree to that? To me, it seems like a more reasonable assumption is that the drone operators would pay the transit agencies money. Since the buses are already going on those routes, the marginal cost for the transit agency should be nearly zero, so it should be easy to make a profit. So this seems like a good way for transit agencies to increase their funding with little downside.
- vulcan01 6y ago
  Increasing the transit agencies' funding would also lead to less taxes...

curiousgal 6y ago

What a stupid idea.

ravenstine 6y ago

Why stop at buses? Why not have drones land on self-driving cars that integrate with Bluetooth? Never mind the noise; we'll design the cars such they output the inverse frequencies being output by the drones, canceling out their sound. Even better, the drones can be designed to look like pies.

samkater 6y ago

When I saw the title, I thought this was brilliant! But I thought they meant a "drone" more like these: https://www.starship.xyz/ https://www.starship.xyz/. (Turns out google responds better to searching for robots when looking those up). A ground robot would alleviate a lot of the concerns about noise and other problems with urban air travel.

CommieBobDole 6y ago

Perhaps we could load all the packages into some sort of specialized "package bus", and the driver could drive it around town all day on an optimized route and carry the packages to the customer's door himself. Joking aside, that does raise the idea of using a delivery truck as sort of a carrier for rechargable drones; truck drives around, packages are automatically distributed to a pool of drones who handle the last hundred yards of delivery and return to the truck to reload/recharge.

dimatura 6y ago
That's exactly the idea. Drones are relatively energy-efficient and are ill-suited for long range transport, specially if they have to haul a package. But for "last mile" delivery it might make sense.
Nasrudith 6y ago
I thought that was one of Amazon's proposed delivery drone schemes before it got a sad but sensibly justifiable veto over concerns of the air space being filled with a high volume of drones whom would constitute a real falling hazard from the base failure rate and an attractive nuisance by being small non-human "faceless" targets with goods. Technically anybody right now could just shoot a poor Amazon delivery drivers with a shotgun now to rob them but it would be murder as opposed to destruction of property. Very few would do so vs snaring or shooting a drone. It is one hell of a bizzare systemic perverse incentive - putting a human body to be at risk reduces the robbery incentive and frequency. Reminds me of one account of Italian medieval cities of merchants plastering their walls with the Virgin Mary so people wouldn't dare to blasphemously piss on her image.
- zitterbewegung 6y ago
  For this even if you automate the driving and package delivery you would still want a human to be onsite to make sure the system doesn’t fail. It would make the amount of delivery trucks smaller making shipments more efficient .
- Threeve303 6y ago

aylmao 6y ago

I do wonder if drone delivery will take off (heh). A lot has been said about the disadvantages, but one also has to also wonder about the advantages. There's a point at which things are "good enough", and small improvements aren't really worth the costs. How much time would using drones for the last couple kilometers save? A few hours? Local delivery trucks tend to make rounds every day, so it really does seem like the maximum amount of time drone delivery could save is one day. Will the cost of operating this (not only monetary, but also organizational, and in terms of noise pollution, drone repair, the occasional package/drone lost, etc) be worth the whole one day faster delivery to customers? This, especially considering drones can't deliver everything, so trucks would have to keep operating. Truck's are large— economically what makes sense is to have them full of packages and with a whole-day schedule. Would drone usage offset enough deliveries to cut a few truck routes? Would they be enough to make it all worth? A lot of questions in the air (heh).

WheelsAtLarge 6y ago

Ok,this is sort of brilliant in it's simplicity and ability to use existing resources. A while back i read an article that theorized that there would be cars all over carrying drones and cars would do most of the transportation while the drones did the last mile or so. Here is a practical example.

ChuckMcM 6y ago

And periodically the bus will swish its trolley pole and all the drones will lift off in a cloud and buzz around and then resettle.

cwkoss 6y ago

I don't understand why the default assumption is that delivery drones need to fly. It seems like you could have a bus-ful of small wheeled drones that could achieve many of the benefits with much fewer safety concerns. Would need to make a package lockbox similar to a mailbox that is accessible by the dronecars, but I think in this day and age of frequent package theft, many would go along with it.

orblivion 6y ago
Maybe they can be amphibious too!
notatoad 6y ago
>Would need to make a package lockbox similar to a mailbox that is accessible by the dronecars at this point, you can almost get rid of the whole last-mile problem that you're trying to solve with the drones, and the delivery truck can just drop off pre-filled lockboxes roadside.
asdff 6y ago
they have these delivering food in santa monica. there are attendants not far away, though, which sort of defeats the purpose imo.

schaefer 6y ago

so, I'm a rock climber, and I'd never go into the mountains without a helmet. because falling objects to the head kill. What are people even thinking, mixing spaces for humans with our fragile little egg heads and corporate swarms of falling death blocks? hmm...

NicoJuicy 6y ago

This is actually quite genius

cerved 6y ago

Here's the actual paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.11840.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.11840.pdf Here's the code: https://github.com/sisl/MultiAgentAllocationTransit.jl https://github.com/sisl/MultiAgentAllocationTransit.jl Much more interesting that some sensationalist "Wow, AI drones are taking the bus" piece