The size of these vehicles is certainly absurd, but flying packages with drones that consume most of their energy to fight gravity does not seem particularly efficient either, (e.g. compared to small road electric vehicles with the same payload, which would have its own practical problems).
This might be news to some people, but there are other modes of transportation / delivery than 2-ton cars. "2-ton cars vs. flying drones" is a false dichotomy.
And I live in such a lovely city. I can bike anywhere so quickly, so easily. Scooters & micromobility are abundant. But so many people (so many roommates over time) make a habit of ordering delivery, on such a regular basis. It's unfathomable to me: both the negative impact in general, and particularly here where it's so close & pleasant to go walk or bike around. It's such a huge expense to the world, and such a great enriching activity, getting a little walkabout.
Speaking as someone who just goes downstairs and makes a sandwich, or who takes some to work, ordering lunch seems absurd to me. Is it that cheap in the US / do you earn that much? Food culture is so weird over there.
At least a delivery vehicle is amortizing by delivering multiple lunches to multiple people in a single trip. When someone drives themselves to lunch, they’re using a 2-ton vehicle for a single lunch.
Delivery vehicles for packages aren’t traveling very far between stops. A 2 ton vehicle dropping off 200 packages on a 100 mile delivery route is averaging 0.5 miles per package and 0.125 kWh where a drone might need to fly 15 miles each way per packages = 30 miles to and from some central hub to do those same routes. Drones are light, but 0.125 kWh to fly 30 miles seems unlikely.
Food delivery might be a better comparison, but 2 pizzas and a 2 liter soda is heavy enough to need a fairly massive drone.
Single meal delivery as an institution is wildly inefficient. The absurd inefficiency of the car as delivery vehicle does not make drones a meaningfully wiser choice.
For every proposed technology, we need desperately to ask: does this really make ecological sense?
Delivering necessities (e.g. medicine) to a remote township with a drone makes sense. Drone-drop pizzas do not.
That's because it is absurd. The same way any convenience is absurd.
Most of the deliveries around the world are done by motorbikes though, not only that but they are done not one at a time but in big chunks. Which is not absurd and pretty good.
Quick tangential question: I watched a few seconds that video and was immediately struck by how Mark sounds so....YouTube'ey? What is it about his intonation and narration style that is so distinctly YouTube? I don't watch enough YouTube to get a sense for whether it's distinct to him or to an entire class of popular channels. Every sentence or two is a "quip" - it's loud and sing-song'y. Lots of phrases seem to end on a rising tone (my parents used to call this "upspeak?" because it sounds like you're asking a question? all the time?).
TLDR: They use various ways of emphasizing words and adding variety to speech. It's almost exclusively done in videos where it's just a face talking to camera to try to make it attention grabbing.
They use Jon Stewart's Daily Show as a pre- YouTube example of someone using the same techniques for the same reasons.
This is an interesting observation. I had a similar observation about tik tok influencer speak, though it’s not the same style as YouTube speak. There is a distinct shared way of speaking I’ve just called the tik tok accent (not talking about the AI voiceover). It’s something I’ve noticed mostly with female influencers, where they talk in a lower, quieter voice, that feels both like they are educating as well as perhaps infantilizing the listener. It’s difficult to describe precisely but definitely a shared phenomenon.
It's awful. I was impressed by the video and the technology, but the presentation style is irritating.
I felt especially sorry for the people working at the Rwanda site just trying to do their jobs efficiently, while he mucks about being fake-excited about everything. There's almost an air of "smile and nod and hope he goes away soon" about it
> I cut my finger making lunch?
So I placed an order for some bandaids a couple minutes ago?
And now they're four seconds away!
That is a nearly silent drone system that can deliver a package from the sky?
Right to my backyard in as little as two minutes?
With dinner plate accuracy!
Where else do people talk like this? What motivates this kind of speech?
My totally made up backstory for why this is is from bad editing in the early days of chopping up multiple takes where the edit does not happen on natural sentence endings so those intonations happen at unnatural places. it then became a thing and now is done in normal delivery as a style to be emulated.
Can’t say for sure where it comes from. But upspeak and it’s tangential culture does more psychic damage to me than advertising, “bad ux”, dubious business models, and most of the other common gripes on here
Mark Rober is one of the big-name youtubers that so many other youtubers try to emulate, so whatever his reasons are, the reason it sounds so "youtubey" is probably because it's how Mark Rober talks in his videos.
Essentially its a learned affectation to come off as approachable and unthreatening (see also Jimmy Fallon) to garner views. Read a "boring" technical article at Ars or watch this guy fumble around and be silly and give these practiced big smiles? A lot of people would rather watch a 20-30 minute video that's entertaining and lower information than read a 5 minute article thats denser.
Essentially this is blogspam in video form and it makes a lot of people very wealthy, so its not going away anytime soon.
As someone who loves the arts, but can't get into youtube personality culture, its just so crazy to me people watch these things. They're a bit infantlizing to me. "Oh you want to learn about these drones? Instead of proper sources here's some guy who will pretend to be your friend and do silly comedic things for you while explaining it to you on the 5th grade level." Umm ok.
The most positive thing I can say is that there are people out there who can't read well (or read English at all) or can't learn from reading well, so these videos can be seen as helping a vulnerable demographic in an accessibility-like way. It may also attract younger people who otherwise would never read an Ars or Hackaday or HN (or whomever) article because these outlets are just not super accessible to them (unknown site to them, written on a too low level, etc). And that these video personalities could be a stepping stone into better and deeper media.
Essentially media is a free capitalist market and people choose their media sources, via their own biases and limitations. If they want everything explained to them via a Jimmy Fallon impersonator, then it will happen. Eventually the lowest common denominator demands questionable gimmicks and the market is more than happy to oblige.
that's not bad, upspeak is a great way to label the phonetic dancing being done. For that guy he always talks like that, something in the strong direction of salesman like. Sometimes you can go far back enough in the video history to sample their persona developing over time, eg ChrisFix videos on YouTube have undergone a more muted and normal speech pattern to the more ebullient stuff you find later.
I think the style arose out of a need to fill a 1-minute video targeted at an audience of low attention-span 13 year olds with 9 additional minutes of CONTENT! in order to meet the length requirement for monetization. If the filler CONTENT! is bombastic and sing-songey, it keeps your attention, however vapid it may be.
Also noteworthy is that Rober is a really good looking former engineer/technician. Most men I've known in the field do not have such as mediagenic appearance, but he is attractive enough that people accept him as a presenter.
They parachute deliver blood, but they will use a different technique for consumers.
From their website:
> Lowering from the body of the Platform 2 Zip, this little droid uses onboard perception to leave packages exactly where they're supposed to go, whether that's a doorstep or patio table.
While that is true for Platform 2 drones, from reading this article [1] it seems the ruling currently only applies to Platform 1 drones (ie. the specs I was referencing). Although it does seem like the Platform 2 drones would be more of what you’d imagine for drones dropping consumer packages in the US. And that article goes on to state that this ruling seems like a jumping off point for securing further exemptions (ie for the Platform 2).
With these specs, I wonder if some countries military wouldn't be willing to offer them more money than they could ever make with deliveries... (At least on a per-drone basis)
However this FAA approval is apparently for the Gen1 fixed wing plane (which is quieter than a drone anyway). Their Gen2 "drone" design is barely audible.
I'm pretty sure Uber is now profitable. Not surprising considering the absurd prices they now charge for delivery. (probably not absurd w.r.t actual cost, but very very far away from the prices that they were charging when they started Uber eats)
Standard brick weights about 2 kg (4 pounds). Plus the drone itself probably another 2 lbs. Imagine getting bonked by a malfunctioning 6 lbs. drone at 200 mph.
This device though doesn't have the density of a brick, and it is aerodynamic: failure modes wouldn't be an uncontrolled freefall, it would be a stable glide.
You could fail-safe this by adding parachute pyrotechnics which require an active command signal to not deploy: that way the worst case total electrical failure of a drone would immediately deploy chutes to slow it down.
This seems like a much more acceptable control then the failure mode of a car: which weighs 2 tons and contrary to popular belief only stays on roads by convention.
That's already more or less a solved problem with consumer drones: outside a catastrophic mechanical failure like a wing shattering or the motherboars spontaneously dying, the failure state is that the drone either returns to its starting location using GPS, or hovers and waits for manual control until its battery is almost out and then slowly descends while beeping loudly.
I’m wondering if eventually airspace will be carved out for commercial drone operations. And if in the future the FAA will attempt to stop enthusiast drone operations via costly regulations in the name of safety for commercial drone ops. As it’s very easy for someone with a DJI drone from to fly beyond LOS.
Also a Walmart in my area has blocked off part of its parking lot to launch 6 delivery drones. I’m going to miss the days of quiet skies.
It certainly looks like hobbyist drones/model aircrafts are going to be regulated out of existence almost everywhere (maybe still permitted at registered club sites, but nowhere else?). Especially now the world has seen videos of weaponised FPV drones in Ukraine.
But I don't see drone deliveries becoming a big thing outside of niche cases (e.g. medical supplies to remote locations with no easy road access). Payload capacity is very limited, wind/weather will ground them, and delivering to arbitrary homes/businesses (without dedicated landing/drop-off zones) isn't a solved problem. Then there's the safety/liability issues when they drones fail/crash. And the inevitability of Americans shooting guns at them.
Read up on the upcoming FAA Remote ID regulations. They were scheduled to go online last Saturday, but were postponed 6 months. They would effectively make it illegal to fly at any altitude without a transponder broadcasting the precise location of the aircraft.
The RC community has been pushing back on the regulations as it ads a lot of weight, expense, and complexity to drones and RC aircraft. There hasn't been any justification given by the FAA as to why these regulations are needed, adding to the confusion. Normally restrictions are put in place after an accident or some incident.
This reminds me of Uber, Lift, and food delivery companies... Years and decades of VC money poured in, and they still can't get profitable. How the fuck anyone can think using drones, with current technology, can be profitable in consumer-centric logistics?
Drone logistics has its unique value proposition, primarily for medical transfers and emergency deliveries in remote areas. But thinking that flying drones from city to city, or inside the city, will replace or offset road logistics to deliver someone a book in 50 minutes is just stupid.
Does anyone here think Zipline will justify its crazy multi-billion valuation?
Things like books are generally in the 'free delivery' part of the delivery market, where your parcel arrives in a day or two on the back of a truck, and one truck does hundreds of deliveries before returning to the depot to reload. IMHO drones are very unlikely to replace trucks in that portion of the market.
But there are also people paying ~$10 per delivery for someone to bring them fast food. Where the driver goes directly from the restaurant to the customer, only carrying a single delivery. They might not need to carry more than 2kg.
Of course that depends on it being safe, reliable, legal, having nontrivial range with its full payload, and not damaging the product.
The cost of food delivery is dirt cheap, though, in most places it’s under $5. The reason it’s so cheap is because it leverages existing infrastructure and there’s an unlimited supply of people willing to deliver for below minimum wage. I can place an order for food and have it arrive within 15 minutes because there’s hundreds of delivery drivers just sitting around waiting in any major city, and that system is very flexible, we can have thousands more drivers on the road in minutes if demand surges.
For drone delivery to compete with this on cost, it would need to have tens of thousands of drones available in any city. How much does a drone and the infrastructure to operate it cost?
Drones benefit from being better over longer distances in cities but otherwise, it’s hard to imagine how they can compete (on price) with a system that is already extremely efficient (at the expense of the people participating in it).
> How the fuck anyone can think using drones, with current technology, can be profitable in consumer-centric logistics?
Thing is, many societies are heading for demographic collapse or are already neck-deep in it (Japan). Even if it may be unprofitable now, we (as a society) need to invest serious amounts of money into automating a lot of unskilled labor, because otherwise we will run into disaster.
You're thinking about automation, not drone deliveries.
Where those aspects intersect is that it seems easier to build an autonomous flying vehicle than an autonomous road-going vehicle. Of course, drones have their own downsides for deliveries, including cost because of small payload.
You don't seembto grasp the reality of delibery drivers salaries. Teamsters are the exception, and even they are competively cheap per parcel delivered, otherwise UPS would never have agreed.
2-3 grant for a month of delivering parcels. How many parcels. 500? 1000?
Thats 2 to 6 dollars per parcel. Goodluck bringing your costs down to that level with drones.
I would definitely use the service if it was offered and pay extra to have things delivered. For example say my car breaks down, I am reading codes off the car and it says I need a part. Call parts store and they have it, have it sent over while I finally get a chance to eat some lunch or something. Also I wouldn't have to find a ride to go get said part.
Middle of cooking dinner and realize you are out of a couple ingredients and they can offer half hour delivery, sometimes it takes 45 minutes in the last city I lived in to get to Walmart. This service would be appealing.
This is going to appeal to those who are ultra busy and are willing to spend a little extra to get something delivered promptly without leaving their home.
Uber, Lyft and other delivery companies require a human to be making the delivery. That's the whole point about why this has potential to be more economically sound.
So you think drones that require recharge (battery replacement) every 40-60 minutes and carry 1.8 to 2kg of cargo will replace a human? I don't think so.
I believe in autonomous drone delivery, which will probably be a reality one day. But the prerequisite for that is enormous advancement in battery technology. Nothing else matters if you can't fly a day or two without recharging.
Given what they have been doing in Rwanda with blood delivery, yeah, I do think they have something going here. The tech is 'mostly' proven to me. The question is one of scale and usage.
There is nothing new there from a technology aspect. What part of the drone didn't exist 20 years ago? Or 50? But I primarily meant on battery technology anyway. Until you have entirely new battery technology that will be compact, ultralight, safe, and long-lasting (at least a day or two of flight without recharge), drone deliveries will not be profitable.
It will serve the niche market, though. But that's not a multibillion-dollar market with a bunch of competitors.
I don't know about justifying their multi-billion dollar valuation but the killer application of this in my mind is for pharmacies. There are a lot of pharmacies offering same day delivery now for both prescription and over the counter drugs, and a lot of people that need drugs that can't otherwise go out and get them on their own. My in-laws get their drugs delivered this way sometimes and it's almost always a driver in their personal car that drops off the delivery. I'm guessing the drivers are only dropping off a few prescriptions per trip, so it's likely not very efficient.
I personally believe this is the way forward, like in a star wars movie full of a plethora of "dumb" robots who have a specific work task, and are almost self sufficient. Like you have a robot that fix delivery drones, a robot that assembles them, and etc.
Drones will be also much better at avoiding obstacles, and they will be much more efficient than cars.
I am not really sure why there isn't more competition in this market. I believe they can build an autonomous delivery hub, and factory.
Irish company Manna have been doing this in two Irish suburbs for a number of years now. They're worth checking out - their CEO Bobby Healy often tweets interesting stuff around payloads, journeys per day, route maps etc. I've worked with them a little and think they're building something really interesting.
I also don't like how the rich get away with things - but is that the case here? Zipline's drones are probably better for the environment than ground vehicles because they are small, light, and electric. They're also supposed to operate at 55 dB for people on the ground - similar to how noisy a delivery van is.
Yea I definitely think it's the case here. The thing about the delivery van is that it doesn't go away, we just add additional noise with the delivery drone. Delivery vans can be made to be electric as well to bring the noise down further and so you actually just get loud drones and quiet delivery vans.
But the delivery drones are just one aspect. We're also going to get these flying taxis and those are going to suck too. Why invest or pay to maintain roads or highways or to build and improve sidewalks, bike lanes, busses, or rail lines when you can just take your air taxi directly to your landing spot and make sure to avoid contact with any humans along the way.
A good lens that you can use to examine this technology is whether the drones and air taxis are additive or subtractive. Good technology tends to be subtractive, i.e. an iPhone replaced a lot of unnecessary things (of course it had some downsides). Sidewalks and bike lanes are another good example of subtractive technology.
Additive technology would be something like a heated seat subscription, or these air taxis and drones. We're not really improving anything we're doing today, we're just adding to it. It's like feature creep.
Did you even watch the video? It specifically addresses the noise pollution question, and is one of their very significant engineering feats. Obviously, it is yet to be proven at scale, but if it works as the vision and developments so far indicate, it would be a net reduction in noise pollution compared to our current infrastructure which executes these deliveries.
It's not just noise pollution, it's visual pollution as well. Pretty soon they'll attach little advertisements to them and cameras and when they fly by your window as your enjoying your morning cup of coffee it'll ID you and slow down a little, track your eyes, make sure you see that Amazon or Costco sells coffee for $14, give you a score, send you an email, and send you a flyer in the mail. They'll know when your backyard is in need of watering, and maybe they'll even see that your garden isn't doing so well and send you ads for fertilizer or alert local gardening companies to stop by and talk about how whatever is really harming your tomatoes and they've got just the solution.
Being noisy and annoying is just the very tip of the development iceberg here.
Can a delivery driver do some of this stuff today and so why haven't they done it yet? Sure. And idk, it'll just take time. The UAV platform is going to be a lot better for this kind of nuisance.
Wing/plane drones are substantially quieter than quadcopter drones. I'm out flying RC with folks all the time and it's genuinely hard to hear an RC plane from more than 100 feet away, and these are handbuilt planes flying for fun.
Yea but I don't want to see or hear them at home. There's enough noise pollution as it is with people revving motorcycles and the like or whatever other peacocking people waste time doing.
There's quite a good video on "Drone Delivery Was Supposed to be the Future. What Went Wrong?". It's been a decade since Bezos launched drone deliveries but it hasn't taken off for a number or reasons including air traffic control around airports, people living in flats and the difficulties of getting a drone to find a safe spot. On the other hand Uber Eats type guys on ebikes have proved a practical solution. https://youtu.be/J-M98KLgaUU
Where are you getting this? I don’t believe there’s any such named street or naming convention like this in Salt Lake. Google Maps appears to agree, since it can’t find that street.
There are addresses that Google reports using naming conventions from other cities, which makes things a little confusing. But locals use Cartesian coordinates for most addresses, it couldn’t be simpler, e.g., 1259 east 900 north (fake address, real naming convention).
Readit News
https://youtu.be/DOWDNBu9DkU
Seems absurd when it's put like that. This is possibly something we'll look back on and struggle to comprehend how it was ever the go-to solution.
There was a time when ordering lunch was reserved for when you were already "on the town" shopping and the like.
Even debating what mode of transportation should be used seems to miss the larger issue and is even kind of gross to my mind.
And I live in such a lovely city. I can bike anywhere so quickly, so easily. Scooters & micromobility are abundant. But so many people (so many roommates over time) make a habit of ordering delivery, on such a regular basis. It's unfathomable to me: both the negative impact in general, and particularly here where it's so close & pleasant to go walk or bike around. It's such a huge expense to the world, and such a great enriching activity, getting a little walkabout.
Food delivery might be a better comparison, but 2 pizzas and a 2 liter soda is heavy enough to need a fairly massive drone.
Here in India a lot of delivery services moved to electric 2 wheelers
For every proposed technology, we need desperately to ask: does this really make ecological sense?
Delivering necessities (e.g. medicine) to a remote township with a drone makes sense. Drone-drop pizzas do not.
Most of the deliveries around the world are done by motorbikes though, not only that but they are done not one at a time but in big chunks. Which is not absurd and pretty good.
No, let's instead try to game the superlinear scaling of power to weight in helicopters!
But that's still hundreds of kilograms.
Deleted Comment
Where/when did this style arise?
TLDR: They use various ways of emphasizing words and adding variety to speech. It's almost exclusively done in videos where it's just a face talking to camera to try to make it attention grabbing.
They use Jon Stewart's Daily Show as a pre- YouTube example of someone using the same techniques for the same reasons.
I felt especially sorry for the people working at the Rwanda site just trying to do their jobs efficiently, while he mucks about being fake-excited about everything. There's almost an air of "smile and nod and hope he goes away soon" about it
Where else do people talk like this? What motivates this kind of speech?
Essentially its a learned affectation to come off as approachable and unthreatening (see also Jimmy Fallon) to garner views. Read a "boring" technical article at Ars or watch this guy fumble around and be silly and give these practiced big smiles? A lot of people would rather watch a 20-30 minute video that's entertaining and lower information than read a 5 minute article thats denser.
Essentially this is blogspam in video form and it makes a lot of people very wealthy, so its not going away anytime soon.
As someone who loves the arts, but can't get into youtube personality culture, its just so crazy to me people watch these things. They're a bit infantlizing to me. "Oh you want to learn about these drones? Instead of proper sources here's some guy who will pretend to be your friend and do silly comedic things for you while explaining it to you on the 5th grade level." Umm ok.
The most positive thing I can say is that there are people out there who can't read well (or read English at all) or can't learn from reading well, so these videos can be seen as helping a vulnerable demographic in an accessibility-like way. It may also attract younger people who otherwise would never read an Ars or Hackaday or HN (or whomever) article because these outlets are just not super accessible to them (unknown site to them, written on a too low level, etc). And that these video personalities could be a stepping stone into better and deeper media.
Essentially media is a free capitalist market and people choose their media sources, via their own biases and limitations. If they want everything explained to them via a Jimmy Fallon impersonator, then it will happen. Eventually the lowest common denominator demands questionable gimmicks and the market is more than happy to oblige.
I've noticed this among a lot of leftist/Liberal podcasting as well (like Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, lot of NPR presenters).
I don't understand it. it sounds unserious
Look forward to more of their successes.
All the 'hover over the house and winch down the package' aspects are still vaporware.
- Cruises at 80-120m and 60mph
- Max payload of 1.8kg
- 50 mile max delivery distance (although it can fly 190 mile on a single charge)
- Payload dropped by parachute from 25-30m into a 5m diameter landing zone.
More details on Wikipedia[1] and the Zipline site[2]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipline_(drone_delivery_comp...
[2] https://www.flyzipline.com/technology
From their website:
> Lowering from the body of the Platform 2 Zip, this little droid uses onboard perception to leave packages exactly where they're supposed to go, whether that's a doorstep or patio table.
[1] https://dronedj.com/2023/09/19/zipline-earns-faa-bvlos-exemp...
Zipline is an FAA-certificated Part 135 operator and will use its Sparrow drone to release the payload via parachute.
That's what really needs solving for mass drones to take off.
However this FAA approval is apparently for the Gen1 fixed wing plane (which is quieter than a drone anyway). Their Gen2 "drone" design is barely audible.
You could fail-safe this by adding parachute pyrotechnics which require an active command signal to not deploy: that way the worst case total electrical failure of a drone would immediately deploy chutes to slow it down.
This seems like a much more acceptable control then the failure mode of a car: which weighs 2 tons and contrary to popular belief only stays on roads by convention.
Dead Comment
Also a Walmart in my area has blocked off part of its parking lot to launch 6 delivery drones. I’m going to miss the days of quiet skies.
But I don't see drone deliveries becoming a big thing outside of niche cases (e.g. medical supplies to remote locations with no easy road access). Payload capacity is very limited, wind/weather will ground them, and delivering to arbitrary homes/businesses (without dedicated landing/drop-off zones) isn't a solved problem. Then there's the safety/liability issues when they drones fail/crash. And the inevitability of Americans shooting guns at them.
The RC community has been pushing back on the regulations as it ads a lot of weight, expense, and complexity to drones and RC aircraft. There hasn't been any justification given by the FAA as to why these regulations are needed, adding to the confusion. Normally restrictions are put in place after an accident or some incident.
Deleted Comment
Drone logistics has its unique value proposition, primarily for medical transfers and emergency deliveries in remote areas. But thinking that flying drones from city to city, or inside the city, will replace or offset road logistics to deliver someone a book in 50 minutes is just stupid.
Does anyone here think Zipline will justify its crazy multi-billion valuation?
But there are also people paying ~$10 per delivery for someone to bring them fast food. Where the driver goes directly from the restaurant to the customer, only carrying a single delivery. They might not need to carry more than 2kg.
Of course that depends on it being safe, reliable, legal, having nontrivial range with its full payload, and not damaging the product.
For drone delivery to compete with this on cost, it would need to have tens of thousands of drones available in any city. How much does a drone and the infrastructure to operate it cost?
Drones benefit from being better over longer distances in cities but otherwise, it’s hard to imagine how they can compete (on price) with a system that is already extremely efficient (at the expense of the people participating in it).
Thing is, many societies are heading for demographic collapse or are already neck-deep in it (Japan). Even if it may be unprofitable now, we (as a society) need to invest serious amounts of money into automating a lot of unskilled labor, because otherwise we will run into disaster.
Where those aspects intersect is that it seems easier to build an autonomous flying vehicle than an autonomous road-going vehicle. Of course, drones have their own downsides for deliveries, including cost because of small payload.
Middle of cooking dinner and realize you are out of a couple ingredients and they can offer half hour delivery, sometimes it takes 45 minutes in the last city I lived in to get to Walmart. This service would be appealing.
This is going to appeal to those who are ultra busy and are willing to spend a little extra to get something delivered promptly without leaving their home.
I believe in autonomous drone delivery, which will probably be a reality one day. But the prerequisite for that is enormous advancement in battery technology. Nothing else matters if you can't fly a day or two without recharging.
So in other words the hard part.
They’re literally building new technology
It will serve the niche market, though. But that's not a multibillion-dollar market with a bunch of competitors.
I think it was Uber, I remember reading that one of them would be profitable if they shut down their R&D department and focused on just ride sharing.
I personally believe this is the way forward, like in a star wars movie full of a plethora of "dumb" robots who have a specific work task, and are almost self sufficient. Like you have a robot that fix delivery drones, a robot that assembles them, and etc.
Drones will be also much better at avoiding obstacles, and they will be much more efficient than cars.
I am not really sure why there isn't more competition in this market. I believe they can build an autonomous delivery hub, and factory.
I wish them all the best.
https://www.manna.aero/
https://twitter.com/realBobbyHealy
This isn't progress, this is selling out our well-being and environment so that a few people can get rich.
But the delivery drones are just one aspect. We're also going to get these flying taxis and those are going to suck too. Why invest or pay to maintain roads or highways or to build and improve sidewalks, bike lanes, busses, or rail lines when you can just take your air taxi directly to your landing spot and make sure to avoid contact with any humans along the way.
A good lens that you can use to examine this technology is whether the drones and air taxis are additive or subtractive. Good technology tends to be subtractive, i.e. an iPhone replaced a lot of unnecessary things (of course it had some downsides). Sidewalks and bike lanes are another good example of subtractive technology.
Additive technology would be something like a heated seat subscription, or these air taxis and drones. We're not really improving anything we're doing today, we're just adding to it. It's like feature creep.
Being noisy and annoying is just the very tip of the development iceberg here.
Can a delivery driver do some of this stuff today and so why haven't they done it yet? Sure. And idk, it'll just take time. The UAV platform is going to be a lot better for this kind of nuisance.
Is there something about the geography or climate of these two places that made them the right choice to be the testbeds for this platform?
https://www.deseret.com/2022/10/4/23385813/drone-delivery-in...
Not sure the rotors would be optimal at that altitude though.
Walmartville might also be problematic with all those shotguns. Bird dogs may not be optimal at retrieving quadcopters. Would make a good SNL skit.
Where are you getting this? I don’t believe there’s any such named street or naming convention like this in Salt Lake. Google Maps appears to agree, since it can’t find that street.
There are addresses that Google reports using naming conventions from other cities, which makes things a little confusing. But locals use Cartesian coordinates for most addresses, it couldn’t be simpler, e.g., 1259 east 900 north (fake address, real naming convention).