7 ms·

Product That Will Eventually Be Made: Getaway Drones

49 points by patmcguire 11y ago

jeffreyrogers 11y ago
I'm skeptical of the idea that drones will deliver everything. That's like saying planes will deliver everything because they're faster than ships. Yet last I checked, most goods are transported on container ships. The thing everyone talking about drones fails to take into account is cost. Drones are very flexible because of their size and the fact that they fly, but as a result they don't scale well. A UPS truck on the other hand can't drive straight line distances between destinations, but it can hold a ton of packages at once without needing to return to some sort of distribution center.
- jessriedel 11y ago
  Huh? No one reasonable claims that drones will deliver everything. The applications are for short/medium-distance delivery that can't be scheduled in advance, and possibly for last-ten-mile scheduled delivery in places that aren't dense enough. (The later will probably be taken over by autonomous cars, whichever comes first.) That's still a massive market, and will make them ubiquitous.
gbin 11y ago
This is basically the overengineered iteration of the current v1: "put the thing in the toilet and flush it"
- anotheryou 11y ago
  toilet is not portable and can't be set of remotely. still over-engineered. look how it's done: https://youtu.be/Wp2CEJb4oyY?t=71 https://youtu.be/Wp2CEJb4oyY?t=71
drcross 11y ago
The scope for accidents it too high. Get a strong gust of wind where you groundplant and you've given your drone away which is covered in you fingerprints.
- fredkbloggs 11y ago
  Well, yes, practically speaking this is a silly idea, like almost everything written about UAVs these days. But the notion that the UAV necessarily has my fingerprints on it is also flawed. It's no more necessary (or wise) to leave my fingerprints on the UAV than it is to leave my fingerprints on a murder weapon or the door of a bank vault. The only catch is that someone clever enough to remember to wear gloves or clean up is also going to have a much more effective way of ensuring their illegal goods are not tied to them.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
ggreer 11y ago
There are many practical uses for drones, but this is not one of them. First, the drone must be outside to be able to escape quickly. That's a problem, as consumer drones aren't designed to spend weeks sitting outdoors. Even if a drone was weatherproof, it would need its batteries topped-up from time to time. Second, you will not have access to your phone or other signaling devices if you are getting busted. It would be very hard to trigger the drone surreptitiously. Last, police are going to notice a drone flying away during a bust. And they won't be happy about it. For all they know, the drone could be carrying a bomb. This escalates the situation and makes a bad outcome much more likely. If you want a better use of drones, here's one: First response. Place drone "nests" every 500 meters in urban areas. Cell towers might be convenient locations. When ShotSpotter[1] detects gunfire, dispatch the closest drone to the scene. It can arrive within 20 seconds, record footage, and relay it to police. Currently, police and medics wait for backup before going to the scene of a shooting. But with drones to send the all-clear, they could treat victims sooner, saving lives. Future upgrades could even allow tracking of suspects. This would make it much harder to get away with firing a gun in a city. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunfire_locator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunfire_locator
- nl 11y ago
  If you want a better use of drones, here's one: First response. Place drone "nests" every 500 meters in urban areas. Cell towers might be convenient locations. When ShotSpotter[1] detects gunfire, dispatch the closest drone to the scene. It can arrive within 20 seconds, record footage, and relay it to police. Currently, police and medics wait for backup before going to the scene of a shooting. But with drones to send the all-clear, they could treat victims sooner, saving lives. Future upgrades could even allow tracking of suspects. This would make it much harder to get away with firing a gun in a city. Persistent Surveillance Systems does this, but not as a response system. They just photograph the entire city from the air once per second and when a shooting happens they rewind, then trace where the suspect came from and went[1]. They don't use drones though. [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/new-surveillance-technology-can-track-everyone-in-an-area-for-several-hours-at-a-time/2014/02/05/82f1556e-876f-11e3-a5bd-844629433ba3_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/new-survei...
- 11y ago
anotheryou 11y ago
balloons do the trick (and have long range). https://youtu.be/Wp2CEJb4oyY?t=71 https://youtu.be/Wp2CEJb4oyY?t=71 maybe multiple balloons will even level out, so they don't all burst in thin air but stay somewhat low?
bayesianhorse 11y ago
I think the main obstacle for drone delivery is that even failure rates as low as 1 per a thousand hours would result in lots of injuries and damaged property. Helicopters and planes are maintained to a ridiculous degree. Without getting that kind of safety into drones, they will fall down on people's heads left and right. Especially once the drone traffic gets dense enough that they can run into each other. "Drones" may be used for drug smuggling, though.
- rwallace 11y ago
  Well, as far as safety goes, consider the following possible delivery vehicles for small packages: 1. A couple of kilograms of drone, that typically won't kill you if it runs into you. 2. A couple of thousand kilograms of vehicle, heavy enough and moving fast enough to kill or cause horrific injuries in even a glancing collision, moving around not up in the air where there is open space but at street level where people are trying to walk around, the vehicle itself being completely brainless and relying entirely at every moment on the control of a fallible, easily distracted human operator, and to cap it all, most likely running on burning fossil fuel. I put it to you that the first option has far better safety properties than the second. If you're going to propose they both be banned, okay, at least that's logically consistent. The one thing you can't do with any sort of consistency or moral authority is criticize the first option while giving the second a free pass.
  - fredkbloggs 11y ago
    Hyperbole much? There is a very obvious difference between trucks and aircraft: the third dimension. Trucks operate on streets and roads, which are clearly identified and known to pedestrians as a hazardous location where extra attention to the rules and conditions is required. While streets and roads could be made safer for pedestrians (and, often, should!), there are literally billions of pedestrian-vehicle interactions every day that are perfectly safe. This is possible because a street is largely a 2- or even 1-dimensional environment with clear, well-known rules for sharing safely and (generally) good visibility so that every participant can get a full mental picture of that environment. Aircraft operate everywhere, and at an altitude well above where most people would think to look. The danger from aircraft is not that a 10kg craft rams you horizontally at 5 m/s while it flies 1 meter above the same sidewalk you're using (though even that would probably cause significant injuries). It's that a 10kg aircraft you never saw, thought to avoid, or even had an opportunity to avoid falls 100 meters onto your head. That, by the way, is going to "kill or cause horrific injuries" every single time. It's fine to hate automobiles. They're not perfect. They do have collisions, and sometimes those collisions kill humans. That's unfortunate, and worth improving. Most of them also burn fossil fuels, which needs to stop (in most of the world, drones will either burn fossil fuels or have batteries charged by electricity generated by a coal-fired power plant, so they're not better). But your "consistent solution" is absurd: a near-total elimination of economic activity in exchange for a very modest reduction in the human death rate. Which reduction would be immediately reversed and then some by the inability of hospitals to procure medical supplies, among many, many other problems. You should probably think about learning to accept a need for nuance. It really helps in thinking about solving problems, which is what engineering is all about. Insisting that everyone must either agree to ban all automobiles or accept the uncontrollable and unavoidable risk of having others' property fall on their head anywhere at any time is not a constructive position and will not help you solve problems. A more useful approach might be to ask yourself what would be required to make UAV flights safer. Are there environments or applications for which these problems could be minimized? What regulations or restrictions would help? Or maybe you'd like to tackle pedestrian safety in urban areas, a much better-studied set of problems. Or maybe you'd like to do some research, gathering some data on UAV failure rates and modes so that you could inform regulators as to which risks matter most. That is, if you want to do something useful. That wasn't clear from your post.
M8 11y ago
Based on title I assumed it's about vacations: put on an VR helmet - fly a drone in Patagonia/Fuji/Arctic.
- benplumley 11y ago
  I was picturing bank robbers climbing into the 'getaway drone' and making a swift exit.
cstross 11y ago
The whole "drones will be used to deliver everything" shtick that's coming out of the USA really does not resonate in the UK or Europe, where most folks live in extremely dense (by American standards) cities -- US suburbia is equivalent in density to open countryside, and many if not most people live in apartments or houses that lack any kind of garden (yard) or garage. (And typically have convenience stores within a hundred metres' walk of the front door, more to the point -- which can already be used for deliveries.) I'm basically calling bullshit on the extreme formulation of drone delivery. There will be some niches that they colonize, and a few that they monopolize (they're going to be a boon for postal/small package deliveries to farms/exurban housing -- Post Office self-driving van goes past without stopping while drone shuttles packages to doorsteps a quarter of a kilometer away) but plenty of areas where they're going to be forbidden due to the unacceptable risk of them falling on someone's head. Here's maybe a better use: Put weatherproofed power sockets with fiber connections on rooftops every 50 meters in urban areas. Then hang your 5G picocells from drones, and dynamically re-structure your mesh of cellphone bases as demand shifts through the day (by physically lifting and transferring the base station to a new fiber/power feed as necessary). Goal being to feed a maximum number of radio channels where demand is high, while avoiding black spots.
- anabis 11y ago
  Yes, in Japan we've had near misses from careless operators. https://youtu.be/uvA6dReF6-I?t=291 https://youtu.be/uvA6dReF6-I?t=291
- golergka 11y ago
  > unacceptable risk of them falling on someone's head Same could be said about airplanes 100 years ago, but now I have planes flying over my head about 20 times a day. Even in the post-9/11 world. The safety of drones will only increase, and with such a great financial incentive as the whole delivery industry, it will do so rapidly.
  - cstross 11y ago
    The safety of airliners comes at a cost -- operating expenses (a lot of which is for maintenance) running so high that they're uneconomical except for bulk/public transport or the hyper-rich. Private flying cars they aren't. Small delivery drones, almost by definition, are your "flying car" paradigm, downsized to just the cargo compartment because they don't need to carry 70-300kg of shaved apes. Maintenance and QA is going to be a big issue, and will drive up prices.
moron4hire 11y ago
I don't want easier FAA licensing of drone pilots, I just want Uber-style flying car pickup. Maybe even have the pilot working remotely to keep the weight down on the aircraft and make it more efficient! I don't need to fly the thing myself, I just don't want to be stuck in the same traffic as everyone else, and the addition of a 3rd dimension greatly increases the available traffic space.
rogerdickey 11y ago
Balloons are cheaper
- snarfy 11y ago
  Reminds me of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp2CEJb4oyY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp2CEJb4oyY
  - vonklaus 11y ago
    That video is fake. I think it is a funny illustration, and could possibly work, however it is not real. Many police forces use Glock 17 pistols, which have a standard capacity of 17 bullets[0]. Ignoring how fake the muzzle blast looks, the "officer" empties his 20 round clip into the air. I can't find a citation, but I believe police are not meant to fire unless they are in danger. While an officer could certainly ignore this, one would know that they could have disciplinary action take for emptying an entire clip haphazardly into the air in a busy location. [0]https://us.glock.com/products/model/g17 https://us.glock.com/products/model/g17
erikb 11y ago
If you can have getaway drones why not have the drones do the delivery in the first place?
bhouston 11y ago
Then there will be police drones that chase other drones or track their location very precisely. Just because cars were invented didn't mean that police continued to use their horses to chase down cars, they also got cars.
jessaustin 11y ago
If we're just spitballing some outlandish crime scenarios.... If it's not dangerous to transport the contraband to some unrecoverable location, why not just destroy it? I'd imagine some thermate or similar reliable rapid incendiary technique would be quicker and less obviously drug-related. If eventual recovery is a priority, a weather balloon with a gps tracker might be a better option than a drone? A drone is going to run out of power within an hour, while a balloon might stay aloft for weeks, so partners in crime can be in position for recovery.

49 points by patmcguire 11y ago

I'm skeptical of the idea that drones will deliver everything. That's like saying planes will deliver everything because they're faster than ships. Yet last I checked, most goods are transported on container ships. The thing everyone talking about drones fails to take into account is cost. Drones are very flexible because of their size and the fact that they fly, but as a result they don't scale well. A UPS truck on the other hand can't drive straight line distances between destinations, but it can hold a ton of packages at once without needing to return to some sort of distribution center.

jessriedel 11y ago
Huh? No one reasonable claims that drones will deliver everything. The applications are for short/medium-distance delivery that can't be scheduled in advance, and possibly for last-ten-mile scheduled delivery in places that aren't dense enough. (The later will probably be taken over by autonomous cars, whichever comes first.) That's still a massive market, and will make them ubiquitous.

gbin 11y ago

This is basically the overengineered iteration of the current v1: "put the thing in the toilet and flush it"

anotheryou 11y ago
toilet is not portable and can't be set of remotely. still over-engineered. look how it's done: https://youtu.be/Wp2CEJb4oyY?t=71 https://youtu.be/Wp2CEJb4oyY?t=71

drcross 11y ago

The scope for accidents it too high. Get a strong gust of wind where you groundplant and you've given your drone away which is covered in you fingerprints.

fredkbloggs 11y ago
Well, yes, practically speaking this is a silly idea, like almost everything written about UAVs these days. But the notion that the UAV necessarily has my fingerprints on it is also flawed. It's no more necessary (or wise) to leave my fingerprints on the UAV than it is to leave my fingerprints on a murder weapon or the door of a bank vault. The only catch is that someone clever enough to remember to wear gloves or clean up is also going to have a much more effective way of ensuring their illegal goods are not tied to them.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

ggreer 11y ago

There are many practical uses for drones, but this is not one of them. First, the drone must be outside to be able to escape quickly. That's a problem, as consumer drones aren't designed to spend weeks sitting outdoors. Even if a drone was weatherproof, it would need its batteries topped-up from time to time. Second, you will not have access to your phone or other signaling devices if you are getting busted. It would be very hard to trigger the drone surreptitiously. Last, police are going to notice a drone flying away during a bust. And they won't be happy about it. For all they know, the drone could be carrying a bomb. This escalates the situation and makes a bad outcome much more likely. If you want a better use of drones, here's one: First response. Place drone "nests" every 500 meters in urban areas. Cell towers might be convenient locations. When ShotSpotter[1] detects gunfire, dispatch the closest drone to the scene. It can arrive within 20 seconds, record footage, and relay it to police. Currently, police and medics wait for backup before going to the scene of a shooting. But with drones to send the all-clear, they could treat victims sooner, saving lives. Future upgrades could even allow tracking of suspects. This would make it much harder to get away with firing a gun in a city. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunfire_locator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunfire_locator

nl 11y ago
If you want a better use of drones, here's one: First response. Place drone "nests" every 500 meters in urban areas. Cell towers might be convenient locations. When ShotSpotter[1] detects gunfire, dispatch the closest drone to the scene. It can arrive within 20 seconds, record footage, and relay it to police. Currently, police and medics wait for backup before going to the scene of a shooting. But with drones to send the all-clear, they could treat victims sooner, saving lives. Future upgrades could even allow tracking of suspects. This would make it much harder to get away with firing a gun in a city. Persistent Surveillance Systems does this, but not as a response system. They just photograph the entire city from the air once per second and when a shooting happens they rewind, then trace where the suspect came from and went[1]. They don't use drones though. [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/new-surveillance-technology-can-track-everyone-in-an-area-for-several-hours-at-a-time/2014/02/05/82f1556e-876f-11e3-a5bd-844629433ba3_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/new-survei...
11y ago

anotheryou 11y ago

balloons do the trick (and have long range). https://youtu.be/Wp2CEJb4oyY?t=71 https://youtu.be/Wp2CEJb4oyY?t=71 maybe multiple balloons will even level out, so they don't all burst in thin air but stay somewhat low?

bayesianhorse 11y ago

I think the main obstacle for drone delivery is that even failure rates as low as 1 per a thousand hours would result in lots of injuries and damaged property. Helicopters and planes are maintained to a ridiculous degree. Without getting that kind of safety into drones, they will fall down on people's heads left and right. Especially once the drone traffic gets dense enough that they can run into each other. "Drones" may be used for drug smuggling, though.

rwallace 11y ago
Well, as far as safety goes, consider the following possible delivery vehicles for small packages: 1. A couple of kilograms of drone, that typically won't kill you if it runs into you. 2. A couple of thousand kilograms of vehicle, heavy enough and moving fast enough to kill or cause horrific injuries in even a glancing collision, moving around not up in the air where there is open space but at street level where people are trying to walk around, the vehicle itself being completely brainless and relying entirely at every moment on the control of a fallible, easily distracted human operator, and to cap it all, most likely running on burning fossil fuel. I put it to you that the first option has far better safety properties than the second. If you're going to propose they both be banned, okay, at least that's logically consistent. The one thing you can't do with any sort of consistency or moral authority is criticize the first option while giving the second a free pass.
- fredkbloggs 11y ago
  Hyperbole much? There is a very obvious difference between trucks and aircraft: the third dimension. Trucks operate on streets and roads, which are clearly identified and known to pedestrians as a hazardous location where extra attention to the rules and conditions is required. While streets and roads could be made safer for pedestrians (and, often, should!), there are literally billions of pedestrian-vehicle interactions every day that are perfectly safe. This is possible because a street is largely a 2- or even 1-dimensional environment with clear, well-known rules for sharing safely and (generally) good visibility so that every participant can get a full mental picture of that environment. Aircraft operate everywhere, and at an altitude well above where most people would think to look. The danger from aircraft is not that a 10kg craft rams you horizontally at 5 m/s while it flies 1 meter above the same sidewalk you're using (though even that would probably cause significant injuries). It's that a 10kg aircraft you never saw, thought to avoid, or even had an opportunity to avoid falls 100 meters onto your head. That, by the way, is going to "kill or cause horrific injuries" every single time. It's fine to hate automobiles. They're not perfect. They do have collisions, and sometimes those collisions kill humans. That's unfortunate, and worth improving. Most of them also burn fossil fuels, which needs to stop (in most of the world, drones will either burn fossil fuels or have batteries charged by electricity generated by a coal-fired power plant, so they're not better). But your "consistent solution" is absurd: a near-total elimination of economic activity in exchange for a very modest reduction in the human death rate. Which reduction would be immediately reversed and then some by the inability of hospitals to procure medical supplies, among many, many other problems. You should probably think about learning to accept a need for nuance. It really helps in thinking about solving problems, which is what engineering is all about. Insisting that everyone must either agree to ban all automobiles or accept the uncontrollable and unavoidable risk of having others' property fall on their head anywhere at any time is not a constructive position and will not help you solve problems. A more useful approach might be to ask yourself what would be required to make UAV flights safer. Are there environments or applications for which these problems could be minimized? What regulations or restrictions would help? Or maybe you'd like to tackle pedestrian safety in urban areas, a much better-studied set of problems. Or maybe you'd like to do some research, gathering some data on UAV failure rates and modes so that you could inform regulators as to which risks matter most. That is, if you want to do something useful. That wasn't clear from your post.

M8 11y ago

Based on title I assumed it's about vacations: put on an VR helmet - fly a drone in Patagonia/Fuji/Arctic.

benplumley 11y ago
I was picturing bank robbers climbing into the 'getaway drone' and making a swift exit.

cstross 11y ago

The whole "drones will be used to deliver everything" shtick that's coming out of the USA really does not resonate in the UK or Europe, where most folks live in extremely dense (by American standards) cities -- US suburbia is equivalent in density to open countryside, and many if not most people live in apartments or houses that lack any kind of garden (yard) or garage. (And typically have convenience stores within a hundred metres' walk of the front door, more to the point -- which can already be used for deliveries.) I'm basically calling bullshit on the extreme formulation of drone delivery. There will be some niches that they colonize, and a few that they monopolize (they're going to be a boon for postal/small package deliveries to farms/exurban housing -- Post Office self-driving van goes past without stopping while drone shuttles packages to doorsteps a quarter of a kilometer away) but plenty of areas where they're going to be forbidden due to the unacceptable risk of them falling on someone's head. Here's maybe a better use: Put weatherproofed power sockets with fiber connections on rooftops every 50 meters in urban areas. Then hang your 5G picocells from drones, and dynamically re-structure your mesh of cellphone bases as demand shifts through the day (by physically lifting and transferring the base station to a new fiber/power feed as necessary). Goal being to feed a maximum number of radio channels where demand is high, while avoiding black spots.

anabis 11y ago
Yes, in Japan we've had near misses from careless operators. https://youtu.be/uvA6dReF6-I?t=291 https://youtu.be/uvA6dReF6-I?t=291
golergka 11y ago
> unacceptable risk of them falling on someone's head Same could be said about airplanes 100 years ago, but now I have planes flying over my head about 20 times a day. Even in the post-9/11 world. The safety of drones will only increase, and with such a great financial incentive as the whole delivery industry, it will do so rapidly.
- cstross 11y ago
  The safety of airliners comes at a cost -- operating expenses (a lot of which is for maintenance) running so high that they're uneconomical except for bulk/public transport or the hyper-rich. Private flying cars they aren't. Small delivery drones, almost by definition, are your "flying car" paradigm, downsized to just the cargo compartment because they don't need to carry 70-300kg of shaved apes. Maintenance and QA is going to be a big issue, and will drive up prices.

moron4hire 11y ago

I don't want easier FAA licensing of drone pilots, I just want Uber-style flying car pickup. Maybe even have the pilot working remotely to keep the weight down on the aircraft and make it more efficient! I don't need to fly the thing myself, I just don't want to be stuck in the same traffic as everyone else, and the addition of a 3rd dimension greatly increases the available traffic space.

rogerdickey 11y ago

Balloons are cheaper

snarfy 11y ago
Reminds me of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp2CEJb4oyY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp2CEJb4oyY
- vonklaus 11y ago
  That video is fake. I think it is a funny illustration, and could possibly work, however it is not real. Many police forces use Glock 17 pistols, which have a standard capacity of 17 bullets[0]. Ignoring how fake the muzzle blast looks, the "officer" empties his 20 round clip into the air. I can't find a citation, but I believe police are not meant to fire unless they are in danger. While an officer could certainly ignore this, one would know that they could have disciplinary action take for emptying an entire clip haphazardly into the air in a busy location. [0]https://us.glock.com/products/model/g17 https://us.glock.com/products/model/g17

erikb 11y ago

If you can have getaway drones why not have the drones do the delivery in the first place?

bhouston 11y ago

Then there will be police drones that chase other drones or track their location very precisely. Just because cars were invented didn't mean that police continued to use their horses to chase down cars, they also got cars.

jessaustin 11y ago

If we're just spitballing some outlandish crime scenarios.... If it's not dangerous to transport the contraband to some unrecoverable location, why not just destroy it? I'd imagine some thermate or similar reliable rapid incendiary technique would be quicker and less obviously drug-related. If eventual recovery is a priority, a weather balloon with a gps tracker might be a better option than a drone? A drone is going to run out of power within an hour, while a balloon might stay aloft for weeks, so partners in crime can be in position for recovery.