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Yeah, I don't see why drones and vans would be mutually exclusve. You drive a van down the main road and have it spin off a fleet of drones for individual resid

Yeah, I don't see why drones and vans would be mutually exclusve. You drive a van down the main road and have it spin off a fleet of drones for individual residential deliveries. They do their thing in 1-2 minutes - far less time than it would take for the driver to get out of the van and walk the package to the door - and then return to wherever the van is currently driving to recharge and pick up the next delivery. The drones never need more than a 1-2 mile range, they recharge while the van is going to the next neighborhood. You avoid all the congested residential streets, the need to find parking or double-park, the risk of hitting kids that run out into the street to catch their ball, the difficulty finding houses, plus all the hard work drivers need to do to walk up driveways and carry heavy packages. Also is very amenable to self-driving trucks, since the delivery van only needs to navigate the main arteries and they have drones acting as the capillaries.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
Truck + driver means you have a real person who can kick boxes around and find stuff in the back. Add drones and you have to create an automated drone loading system which works on multiple drones simultaneously. Otherwise you have truck + 2 (3? 4?) drones + person, and the person loads one drone while the other is/others are delivering. That will save some time, but not enough to be a game changer. There will still be kicking of boxes. Meanwhile drones will have to autodock to a charging cradle, land, be loaded, deliver, and then either repeat or autodock again. The system breaks down badly if there's any kind of issue.
waste_monk 5y ago
>and then return to wherever the van is currently driving to recharge and pick up the next delivery Are battery charging times fast enough to support this? I thought we're still at the "5 minutes flight = a couple of hours charging" stage, but I haven't used anything more advanced than one of those miniature toy quadcopters so I'm not sure how more serious drones (DJI etc.) handle it.
- jnwatson 5y ago
  They simply have easily replaceable batteries. For a major event, they’d have lots of batteries charging.
  - pempem 5y ago
    Simply worse for the environment?
    - munk-a 5y ago
      Replaceable doesn't mean one-time-use necessarily - it might just mean that the recharge time is longer than the downtime expected between deliveries so you'd need to swap out a new battery after each run while you recharge the used one. There are a lot of assumptions here but it seems sane.
  - waste_monk 5y ago
    That just raises more questions - do you have some complicated automatic battery swap system, or have an extra human on-board to manage the drones? At least if it was a person they could also load packages onto the drones as you drive, else you'd need to automate that as well. Do you charge batteries on the van, or just swap trays of them each time you return to the depot? How much of the van's internal volume are you trading for drone-related subsystems rather than cargo storage? It seems impractical.
    - notatoad 5y ago
      if you have developed drones with the ability to return to a van and autonomously pick up the next package to deliver, picking up a battery at the same time shouldn't be a difficult step on top of that. there's lots of things about drone delivery that seems impractical, but not sure that battery swaps are one of those things.
      - waste_monk 5y ago
        You can't build the battery-changing system into the drone due to size, power, and weight constraints, so it has to be part of the van. So you need something on the van that can 1) Secure the drone in place while the battery is being changed, and ensure drone can successfully land with sufficient precision for the battery changer to work, or to manoeuvre the drone into place. Probably you would also want to keep supplying auxiliary power to the drone so you don't have to wait for it to reboot and reconnect to the van's swarm management when the battery is removed. 2) Physically remove and replace the battery, including manipulation of any connectors and fasteners required. 3) Convey batteries between the drone and the storage inside the van. I imagine this would work something like an LTO tape library, where the van tracks which storage slots are occupied, if they've been used or not, and have some internal mechanism which moves batteries between the storage slots and the battery changing mechanism. I can see this being quite bulky, as with that many batteries you would need compartmentalisation and maybe even a miniature fire-suppression system in case one of the batteries "cooks off". 4) Must not interfere with whatever cargo-loading system is in place - you could have a nice flat battery tray in the roof, but you might need to punch a hole through it to fit a cargo elevator or so on. Also, must not take up too much internal volume of the van that could be better used for profitable activities (storing cargo for delivery) 5) It would still have to comply with normal road requirements such as maximum heights, environmental resistance (rain, dust, etc.) and so on. That's just off the top of my head, I'm not an engineer and I'm sure there are plenty more challenges that I haven't thought of.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago

Truck + driver means you have a real person who can kick boxes around and find stuff in the back. Add drones and you have to create an automated drone loading system which works on multiple drones simultaneously. Otherwise you have truck + 2 (3? 4?) drones + person, and the person loads one drone while the other is/others are delivering. That will save some time, but not enough to be a game changer. There will still be kicking of boxes. Meanwhile drones will have to autodock to a charging cradle, land, be loaded, deliver, and then either repeat or autodock again. The system breaks down badly if there's any kind of issue.

waste_monk 5y ago

>and then return to wherever the van is currently driving to recharge and pick up the next delivery Are battery charging times fast enough to support this? I thought we're still at the "5 minutes flight = a couple of hours charging" stage, but I haven't used anything more advanced than one of those miniature toy quadcopters so I'm not sure how more serious drones (DJI etc.) handle it.

jnwatson 5y ago
They simply have easily replaceable batteries. For a major event, they’d have lots of batteries charging.
- pempem 5y ago
  Simply worse for the environment?
  - munk-a 5y ago
    Replaceable doesn't mean one-time-use necessarily - it might just mean that the recharge time is longer than the downtime expected between deliveries so you'd need to swap out a new battery after each run while you recharge the used one. There are a lot of assumptions here but it seems sane.
- waste_monk 5y ago
  That just raises more questions - do you have some complicated automatic battery swap system, or have an extra human on-board to manage the drones? At least if it was a person they could also load packages onto the drones as you drive, else you'd need to automate that as well. Do you charge batteries on the van, or just swap trays of them each time you return to the depot? How much of the van's internal volume are you trading for drone-related subsystems rather than cargo storage? It seems impractical.
  - notatoad 5y ago
    if you have developed drones with the ability to return to a van and autonomously pick up the next package to deliver, picking up a battery at the same time shouldn't be a difficult step on top of that. there's lots of things about drone delivery that seems impractical, but not sure that battery swaps are one of those things.
    - waste_monk 5y ago
      You can't build the battery-changing system into the drone due to size, power, and weight constraints, so it has to be part of the van. So you need something on the van that can 1) Secure the drone in place while the battery is being changed, and ensure drone can successfully land with sufficient precision for the battery changer to work, or to manoeuvre the drone into place. Probably you would also want to keep supplying auxiliary power to the drone so you don't have to wait for it to reboot and reconnect to the van's swarm management when the battery is removed. 2) Physically remove and replace the battery, including manipulation of any connectors and fasteners required. 3) Convey batteries between the drone and the storage inside the van. I imagine this would work something like an LTO tape library, where the van tracks which storage slots are occupied, if they've been used or not, and have some internal mechanism which moves batteries between the storage slots and the battery changing mechanism. I can see this being quite bulky, as with that many batteries you would need compartmentalisation and maybe even a miniature fire-suppression system in case one of the batteries "cooks off". 4) Must not interfere with whatever cargo-loading system is in place - you could have a nice flat battery tray in the roof, but you might need to punch a hole through it to fit a cargo elevator or so on. Also, must not take up too much internal volume of the van that could be better used for profitable activities (storing cargo for delivery) 5) It would still have to comply with normal road requirements such as maximum heights, environmental resistance (rain, dust, etc.) and so on. That's just off the top of my head, I'm not an engineer and I'm sure there are plenty more challenges that I haven't thought of.