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Amazon’s Drone Delivery Dream Is Crashing

26 points by pd33 4y ago

PaulHoule 4y ago
… wasn’t this the case three (or so) years ago? Right up there with the smart speaker and the self-driving supermarket? Too bad they had to take away two-day shipping with Prime, that was something that really worked…
type0 4y ago
"You'll own nothing and you'll be happy. Whatever you want you'll rent and it'll be delivered by a drone." 8 Prediction for the World in 2030 by WEF in 2016
squokko 4y ago
There was never a drone delivery dream. This has been PR since Day 1. And this article is proof that it worked.
- marssaxman 4y ago
  I believed the same; it never seemed plausible to me that Amazon actually thought they could make drone delivery profitable. But... organizing an 850-person division which builds actual hardware sounds more like a real investment than just a PR effort.
  - squokko 4y ago
    A big part of the PR is internal - to make people at Amazon from the top to the bottom feel like they're still working at a "Day One" innovative company building cool new tech that they can excitedly tell their family about over Thanksgiving dinner. That's why it has to be a bit bigger than just some AI-generated stock imagery.
- sourcecodeplz 4y ago
  That zipline company seems quite legit. There was a youtube video about it just 2 days ago.
  - squokko 4y ago
    Yes, to be clear - Amazon has never had a real drone delivery dream. It's just theatrics for them.
pg938hkd 4y ago
[dead]
rcarr 4y ago
> “The computer, the ACS, the brain of the whole thing, is constantly telling the aircraft what to do and how to do it,” they say. “So when that restarts, you’re no longer getting power or signals or command to the motors. Everything goes offline. It turns into a brick and falls from the sky.” Feels like it would be relatively trivial to have some kind of parachute system that went off automatically on system failure. Combine it with a GPS beacon and a separate loudspeaker and battery that goes off so people are alerted to it coming down so they can get out of the way. Either way, if SpaceX can make self landing rockets, I'm pretty sure we as a species can figure out how to do drone delivery properly.
- boringuser2 4y ago
  Don't be so sure. A lot of automation simply isn't possible without AGI.
  - Turskarama 4y ago
    That may be true but drone deliveries definitely are. As stated in the article, plenty of other companies have already solved these problems.
- robomartin 4y ago
  > Feels like it would be relatively trivial to have some kind of parachute system that went off automatically on system failure. > if SpaceX can make self landing rockets Failure tolerant design isn't well understood by engineers who do not live in that world. We speak of Fault Tolerance levels, or FT-levels for short. FT0 means any one failure renders the system inoperable. In other words, it can't even tolerate a single failure. What "inoperable" means is --in terms of consequences-- is a function of what the system in question might be. If we are talking about a life support system in a spacecraft, FT0 is a really bad idea. An example of a an FT0 system that might not have a horrible failure mode might be a bicycle tire. If the valve fails, it deflates. For the most part, that's not likely to be horrific. Yes, the tire does not work and becomes horribly inefficient, however, it is unlikely it will kill you. There are other elements of a bike that could definitely kill you with a single failure, particularly at speed. Anything that causes the front wheel to come off qualifies. Higher FT levels provide protection from catastrophic failure. NASA, for example, used to require FT2 for life support systems (tolerate two failures). This, however, changed over the years to a more sophisticated framework. For example, redundancy alone does not fulfill safety requirements. In terms of drones, no, one can't think of a trivial parachute system providing failure tolerance in real terms. Design Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (DFMEA) is the very first step in understanding how a drone could fail and create undesirable consequences; two of which could be harming people or property. This subject area isn't simple. It also isn't impossible to create failure tolerant designs. The issue, outside of aerospace/military applications is that FT designs can get very expensive, very quickly. It can be hard to justify some of the design decisions one might have to make in the context of low cost commercial products. This is the main issue with drones. Wikipedia covers the topic to a reasonable depth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fault_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fault_tolerance

26 points by pd33 4y ago

… wasn’t this the case three (or so) years ago? Right up there with the smart speaker and the self-driving supermarket? Too bad they had to take away two-day shipping with Prime, that was something that really worked…

type0 4y ago

"You'll own nothing and you'll be happy. Whatever you want you'll rent and it'll be delivered by a drone." 8 Prediction for the World in 2030 by WEF in 2016

squokko 4y ago

There was never a drone delivery dream. This has been PR since Day 1. And this article is proof that it worked.

marssaxman 4y ago
I believed the same; it never seemed plausible to me that Amazon actually thought they could make drone delivery profitable. But... organizing an 850-person division which builds actual hardware sounds more like a real investment than just a PR effort.
- squokko 4y ago
  A big part of the PR is internal - to make people at Amazon from the top to the bottom feel like they're still working at a "Day One" innovative company building cool new tech that they can excitedly tell their family about over Thanksgiving dinner. That's why it has to be a bit bigger than just some AI-generated stock imagery.
sourcecodeplz 4y ago
That zipline company seems quite legit. There was a youtube video about it just 2 days ago.
- squokko 4y ago
  Yes, to be clear - Amazon has never had a real drone delivery dream. It's just theatrics for them.

pg938hkd 4y ago

[dead]

rcarr 4y ago

> “The computer, the ACS, the brain of the whole thing, is constantly telling the aircraft what to do and how to do it,” they say. “So when that restarts, you’re no longer getting power or signals or command to the motors. Everything goes offline. It turns into a brick and falls from the sky.” Feels like it would be relatively trivial to have some kind of parachute system that went off automatically on system failure. Combine it with a GPS beacon and a separate loudspeaker and battery that goes off so people are alerted to it coming down so they can get out of the way. Either way, if SpaceX can make self landing rockets, I'm pretty sure we as a species can figure out how to do drone delivery properly.

boringuser2 4y ago
Don't be so sure. A lot of automation simply isn't possible without AGI.
- Turskarama 4y ago
  That may be true but drone deliveries definitely are. As stated in the article, plenty of other companies have already solved these problems.
robomartin 4y ago
> Feels like it would be relatively trivial to have some kind of parachute system that went off automatically on system failure. > if SpaceX can make self landing rockets Failure tolerant design isn't well understood by engineers who do not live in that world. We speak of Fault Tolerance levels, or FT-levels for short. FT0 means any one failure renders the system inoperable. In other words, it can't even tolerate a single failure. What "inoperable" means is --in terms of consequences-- is a function of what the system in question might be. If we are talking about a life support system in a spacecraft, FT0 is a really bad idea. An example of a an FT0 system that might not have a horrible failure mode might be a bicycle tire. If the valve fails, it deflates. For the most part, that's not likely to be horrific. Yes, the tire does not work and becomes horribly inefficient, however, it is unlikely it will kill you. There are other elements of a bike that could definitely kill you with a single failure, particularly at speed. Anything that causes the front wheel to come off qualifies. Higher FT levels provide protection from catastrophic failure. NASA, for example, used to require FT2 for life support systems (tolerate two failures). This, however, changed over the years to a more sophisticated framework. For example, redundancy alone does not fulfill safety requirements. In terms of drones, no, one can't think of a trivial parachute system providing failure tolerance in real terms. Design Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (DFMEA) is the very first step in understanding how a drone could fail and create undesirable consequences; two of which could be harming people or property. This subject area isn't simple. It also isn't impossible to create failure tolerant designs. The issue, outside of aerospace/military applications is that FT designs can get very expensive, very quickly. It can be hard to justify some of the design decisions one might have to make in the context of low cost commercial products. This is the main issue with drones. Wikipedia covers the topic to a reasonable depth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fault_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fault_tolerance