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It doesn't seem like the battery density exists for anything except fairly short distances with very small packages. For the vast majority of deliveries, this

It doesn't seem like the battery density exists for anything except fairly short distances with very small packages. For the vast majority of deliveries, this could only be a "last mile" mechanism, with the bulk of each delivery happening via more traditional transport. 30-minute delivery from the warehouse? Not going to be possible for 99% of purchases, even those that are under the weight limits. Moreover, you can't just have hoardes of flying vehicles randomly over populated areas (and if this was at all practical, every company and its dog company would be trying to do the same thing), so you'd need fairly strict regulations on where they actually fly, and a system for managing them (e.g. limiting the number of flights by all companies). They'd probably need to do things like limit the paths that could be followed, maybe above public roads (which would reduce the delivery radius). Whatever happens, the (necessary, because it involves public safety and contention for a limited common resource) regulation and government control is going to slow the process down, probably a lot more than Amazon's timeline suggests... Even if they could grind through all the problems, get government support, and setup a system to do final delivery of very small purchases by air... is the investment required to do all this worth it to be able to deliver a vanishingly small proportion of packages more quickly? What this really looks like is an unintentional leak of Amazon's next April 1st gag...

a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
> battery density Why wouldn't these drones be gasoline powered?
- NoPiece 13y ago
  Noise would be an issue with gas powered drones.
  - gwern 13y ago
    Cars aren't that noisy, and drones are going to be high up in any case.
    - decktech 13y ago
      Cars don't have eight rotor blades slapping the air, and we've gotten pretty good at enclosing all the loud bits (on expensive cars). Noise would certainly be a problem for gas-powered drones.
      - NoPiece 13y ago
        And gas powered cars are a lot louder than electric cars.
    - bteitelb 13y ago
      To minimize noise and visual pollution, it would be better for these drones to fly low, along existing roads to take advantage of existing noise abatement measures (e.g. noise barriers walls, berms, roadside vegetation, etc.)
- sbierwagen 13y ago
  A quadrotor (or 8-rotor here) drone depends on rapidly throttling the propeller speed on each arm up and down, something that you can't do with a mechanical transmission without adding a lot of weight. You can do a gas/electric hybrid, but again, weight.
  - a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
    I kind of also wonder why not a more traditional articulated rotor helicopter design. The point of the quadrotors is they're cheap and simple, despite being much less efficient. Surely the capital investment in a full fleet of these things would favor a true helicopter rotor.
toyg 13y ago
>What this really looks like is an unintentional leak of Amazon's next April 1st gag … by CBS News? Don't think so.
andrewtbham 13y ago
bezos said the current range is 10 miles on 60 minutes.
Plasmoid 13y ago
Actually, contention for air space wouldn't be that bad. Modern airplanes have a pressure transponder which announces your flight id and the air pressure at your location. From which you can determine a direction, id, and altitude. Create an automated ATC, some simple separation rules (100' vertical, 500' horizontal), and order that drones flying east are on odd multiples of 100', westbound flights on even multiples. You know where thing is and where it's going. Maybe add in some prohibited zones around airports or tall buildings and you are pretty much done.
- snogglethorpe 13y ago
  The thing is, if this idea proves viable, there are going to be (or at least there will be demand for) many orders of magnitude more of these than there are traditional types of air vehicles... And because of the very short range, much of that will probably be in dense urban areas (so it won't be anything like evenly distributed). So... I dunno if traditional approaches to avoiding airspace contention will work so well...
  - Plasmoid 13y ago
    Perhaps, but would the air traffic be any worse than road traffic? Say you had 5 flight levels each direction, so 10 'levels' in all. Would we have more than an order of magnitude more flight traffic than road traffic? I would argue no.
    - chongli 13y ago
      Would we have more than an order of magnitude more flight traffic than road traffic? I would argue no. We might. This sort of disruptive innovation could be staggering in scope. I could imagine putting in an order for a weekly grocery bill and having dozens of drones deliver the items from all over the place. Currently, we have an infrastructure that assumes we'll ship myriad items to a centralized clearing house (hub topology). It'd actually be far more efficient to eliminate this redundant, single point of failure and build something more akin to a mesh network. Items such as locally grown produce may even be shipped directly from farm to doorstep.
markvdb 13y ago
Battery density is not that much of a problem. Supply from warehouse to moving warehouse vehicle (truck?) to multiple delivery vehicles (drones). Parallellise and automate the last mile.

a8da6b0c91d 13y ago

> battery density Why wouldn't these drones be gasoline powered?

NoPiece 13y ago
Noise would be an issue with gas powered drones.
- gwern 13y ago
  Cars aren't that noisy, and drones are going to be high up in any case.
  - decktech 13y ago
    Cars don't have eight rotor blades slapping the air, and we've gotten pretty good at enclosing all the loud bits (on expensive cars). Noise would certainly be a problem for gas-powered drones.
    - NoPiece 13y ago
      And gas powered cars are a lot louder than electric cars.
  - bteitelb 13y ago
    To minimize noise and visual pollution, it would be better for these drones to fly low, along existing roads to take advantage of existing noise abatement measures (e.g. noise barriers walls, berms, roadside vegetation, etc.)
sbierwagen 13y ago
A quadrotor (or 8-rotor here) drone depends on rapidly throttling the propeller speed on each arm up and down, something that you can't do with a mechanical transmission without adding a lot of weight. You can do a gas/electric hybrid, but again, weight.
- a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
  I kind of also wonder why not a more traditional articulated rotor helicopter design. The point of the quadrotors is they're cheap and simple, despite being much less efficient. Surely the capital investment in a full fleet of these things would favor a true helicopter rotor.

toyg 13y ago

>What this really looks like is an unintentional leak of Amazon's next April 1st gag … by CBS News? Don't think so.

andrewtbham 13y ago

bezos said the current range is 10 miles on 60 minutes.

Plasmoid 13y ago

Actually, contention for air space wouldn't be that bad. Modern airplanes have a pressure transponder which announces your flight id and the air pressure at your location. From which you can determine a direction, id, and altitude. Create an automated ATC, some simple separation rules (100' vertical, 500' horizontal), and order that drones flying east are on odd multiples of 100', westbound flights on even multiples. You know where thing is and where it's going. Maybe add in some prohibited zones around airports or tall buildings and you are pretty much done.

snogglethorpe 13y ago
The thing is, if this idea proves viable, there are going to be (or at least there will be demand for) many orders of magnitude more of these than there are traditional types of air vehicles... And because of the very short range, much of that will probably be in dense urban areas (so it won't be anything like evenly distributed). So... I dunno if traditional approaches to avoiding airspace contention will work so well...
- Plasmoid 13y ago
  Perhaps, but would the air traffic be any worse than road traffic? Say you had 5 flight levels each direction, so 10 'levels' in all. Would we have more than an order of magnitude more flight traffic than road traffic? I would argue no.
  - chongli 13y ago
    Would we have more than an order of magnitude more flight traffic than road traffic? I would argue no. We might. This sort of disruptive innovation could be staggering in scope. I could imagine putting in an order for a weekly grocery bill and having dozens of drones deliver the items from all over the place. Currently, we have an infrastructure that assumes we'll ship myriad items to a centralized clearing house (hub topology). It'd actually be far more efficient to eliminate this redundant, single point of failure and build something more akin to a mesh network. Items such as locally grown produce may even be shipped directly from farm to doorstep.

markvdb 13y ago

Battery density is not that much of a problem. Supply from warehouse to moving warehouse vehicle (truck?) to multiple delivery vehicles (drones). Parallellise and automate the last mile.