Food delivery companies as well seemed to be testing out robots that would bring your food to you albeit in a more sidewalk bound way
Its been a few years and I have yet to have a single thing drone delivered to my house
What happened to that alternate future? Are companies still working on it? Or did we move on from that idea for some reasons we discovered?
1. FAA regulations - delivery drones can't operate within X miles of an airport (technically they can, but it requires a much stricter degree of certification and compliance nobody wants to bother with)
2. Drones need a landing space, so people without yards (like apartment and townhouse dwellers, who make up a lot of the population in exactly the densely populated areas where you'd want to use drones to begin with) can't be served
And it turns out that once you exclude "houses within X miles of an airport" and "houses without an LZ", there aren't enough customers left to make delivery drones worth it.
A lone driver might get paid X $/hour but in a rural area, only reach a single house with his truck, whereas the same driver might make 10x deliveries in the same time period in an urban area. And optimally, you'd have one drone pilot controlling multiple drones at the same time with each one taking less time than a car.
I'm guessing the biggest cost here isn't fuel or energy, it's the staffing.
4. Payloads on flying things have severe weight and volume limitations. This limits what you can deliver to things that are small and light.
5. An autonomous drone represents an opportunity for theft or interference. See the drone coming, then: steal the goods when it delivers, interfere with its GPS and force it into an error mode that lands the drone, etc. You don't even need to be at the destination.
6. Multicopters, the devices most people think of when they think drones, have terrible range and payload capacity. The flight mode is akin to helicopters, "beat the air into submission". On the upside, they can hover on the spot. In contrast, plane-style drones which fly aerodynamically or "on the wing", have more range (being more efficient), but have difficulty landing on specific spots and then returning back to base. There are solutions around this, but not 100% viable in all cases. VTOL planes exist for instance, but they're finicky. Parachutes as a delivery mechanism also exist, but not everything can be delivered by dropping a payload.
And much more...
Air delivery exists in places where these aren't concerns and where the cost benefit analysis skews the other way. Zipline [0] has been doing a great job delivering blood to remote areas in Rwanda for a while now. Their product, payload, delivery method, geographical location, regulatory environment, all align to make it worth it. Watch some youtube videos of their operation, it's pretty neat.
This point to me seems like such an obvious hard limit on how well this could ever work without some serious advancements in battery tech, and it's why the whole thing seemed like mostly snake oil to me.
The x-copters have very low weight limits (and low flight times when loaded) and realistically this wouldn't be possible for weights over ~10 pounds without very short range limitations and massive downtime for recharging (and/or truly massive drones, which would pose too much of a safety risk in populated areas).
Not to mention the physical shape of even many small / light objects would make stable flight difficult or impossible. The second the wind picks up, they are in serious trouble.
Maybe some small and very specific niches can utilize it, but I suspect in almost all cases (even when it is possible to use these things optimally) driving is actually going to be cheaper overall.
> 1. FAA regulations - delivery drones can't operate within X miles of an airport (technically they can, but it requires a much stricter degree of certification and compliance nobody wants to bother with)
Nope. This isn't really the issue at all. We have an airport near by (two if you count the hospital and the FAA does). UAS delivery isn't actually under UAS rules, it's under commercial freight delivery rules. This is how Project Wing/Google operate because the FAA still doesn't allow beyond line of sight operations for UAS.
> 2. Drones need a landing space, so people without yards (like apartment and townhouse dwellers, who make up a lot of the population in exactly the densely populated areas where you'd want to use drones to begin with) can't be served
Sorta. They don't actually land, they drop the payload while hovering. So they do need some uninstructed space to drop the package, but not much. Works well in the suburbs and rural areas but awful in the city.
> And it turns out that once you exclude "houses within X miles of an airport" and "houses without an LZ", there aren't enough customers left to make delivery drones worth it.
Again, not an airport problem.
It's really economics. It's v expensive per gram to deliver by drone. That's why it works well for light but high value things (like medicine) but sucks for stuff like food.
I always suspected the reason was purely profit-driven so it's good to hear it confirmed.
I know I'm getting cynical as I age, but the idea that regulation was the only thing in the way of it seemed laughable given recent history.
What's the plan there? Leave my package out in the middle of the yard to get rained on or stolen?
That would make sense if this was some incredibly capital-intense thing to develop and enjoyed immense economies of scale. But I don't see why that would be the case. Surely there are many thousands of towns each with tens of thousands of single-family homes that are sufficiently far from an airport and currently served by daily package deliveries via automobile. Unless we're considering every tiny community airport.
Most new town homes have rooftop decks (because Seattle doesn’t get much snow), why can’t they land on those?
3. Drones kept getting shot down during testing
Not kidding
It wouldn't surprise me if the kinks are being ironed out here before opening it up in bigger markets.
There were a fair few complaints about the noise for the logan ones when they first came out but apparently they are "mostly" sorted now.
- https://www.facebook.com/7NEWSBrisbane/videos/logan-is-becom... - https://doordash.news/australia/doordash-and-wing-announce-p... - https://www.businessnewsaustralia.com/articles/wing-s-drone-...
Its logan, so you know, kids on dirtbikes, dogs, road noise, fireworks, loud music etc I barely notice the drones.
They don’t have to deal with traffic or 3rd party delivery drivers. From hitting order to my first bite was under 30 minutes (on my second order, my first order was super late but they comped me - the first delivery they have a member watch the drone land in your yard to ensure it’s working).
My sense is that drone delivery has the same weather dependency as self-driving cars, only greatly magnified.
If people have the option to get a package ~10% slower for ~60% cheaper, they'll take the slower option the vast majority of the time.
I would have assumed that the savings in labor would be eaten by drones using more energy, but it looks like drones can actually be significantly more energy efficient than light-trucks for delivery: https://engineering.cmu.edu/news-events/news/2022/09/16-last...
Energy is the second biggest input in delivery cost.
Let me put it another way... it's very inefficient to move cargo by a fleet of cars vs a fleet of trucks, and it's even more efficient to move cargo by train.
But it would be terribly inefficient to move that train to your home. A UPS truck is more efficient than a train, and a guy on a bike might be more efficient than a UPS truck, other than labor.
But if we can get an autonomous vehicle, then the labor goes away, and if the delivery drone is electric, then it can largely be very efficient- going point to point in a straight line.
I hadn't thought about it before, but it makes so much sense.
Starship (https://www.starship.xyz/) have been running in a big way regularly in Milton Keynes (UK) for years now; the little robots driving around are a regular feature. Seems to be expanding to Cambridge (UK) too.
I imagine US suburb design makes this less feasible (I think I read that Starship started on college campuses in the states), and that's why we don't hear so much excitement about this approach? It seems to make way more sense to me than drones, mostly for the weather issue
If you built your drone on mostly visual data... or visual-centric sensor fusion... imagine trying to deliver in NYC with The Fog. The tradeoff drones make for their airspace is being at an altitude where there's an awful lot of "terrain".
Fortunately it's not like that here but I'm not in an area that's probably dense enough for drone delivery for a bit (except subdivisions/etc).
At these tasks, they excel and are in so much demand that both sides of the Russian invasion of Ukraine can’t produce enough quantity to meet demand.
There isn't that great a selection of stuff that you can get, and some stores have come and gone from the app.
It's just not that useful. We live in the suburbs, and a weekly trip to the grocery store or big box store (5-10 min drives) can get so much more and at a better price than buying things individually. It's kind of like milk delivery - it made sense before refrigeration but after that, you would buy weekly and just store it.
And right now delivery is free, but it would be even worse if/when it isn't.
One area where it could work is coffee/tea delivery (Starbucks, etc). These are things you buy individually and typically everyday. But AFAIK we don't have that and its not on the horizon.
Former delivery robot startup cofounder (Robby Technologies) here. To be honest hardware was by far the most time-consuming thing. I wanted to spend 80%+ of our engineering time and funds on software but it turned out that we ended up spending 80%+ of the time dealing with electromechanical issues, supply chain issues, bad USB cables, motor controller issues, shitty crimping jobs, thermal management, plastic breakage, bad PCBs, bad BMS, bad lithium cells, snapping drive belts, malfunctioning locks, malfunctioning cameras, manufacturer-mislabeled motor wires, sensors that didn't meet specs, antenna placement and RF interference, and lots more. Then there was the operational overhead of figuring out how to charge, move, and store all of them, and how to get things in/out of them when businesses weren't willing to walk from the store to the sidewalk to drop something in a robot, and the customers weren't always willing to come outside to grab their stuff. Then there were robots that got stuck in potholes and the like, and had to be rescued by driving out to them. All that while trying to scale up manufacturing, which never really happened beyond a certain scale. Guess how much time we had left for writing autonomous software.
The thing is, autonomous driving, especially on the sidewalk is actually much easier than the hardware problem of figuring out how to design, build, and scale a new type of vehicle from scratch. The main issue is we, and likely all the other companies, were stuck in a hellhole of hardware problems that something was always "on fire" hardware-wise.
In retrospect I see the companies that went to the roads instead of the sidewalks had it slightly easier on the hardware side: they could just buy a reliable car and mod it, and get to work on software. Safety-wise, of course, they have it much harder, it's a trade-off.
Drones have to be specifically designed and manufactured to pass the FAA's certification program. We've all seen capable drones from Amazon's marketing, but does it please the FAA? A drone can't do the job until the FAA signs off on that make/model. It's not easy to do and requires developing a craft with all sorts of safety features.
Companies are making progress, and I think the most insightful videos to watch on the topic come from Zipline. They're already operating in Rwanda with support from their government. They have a streamlined service and make 100s of deliveries per day.
"The Air Commerce Act of May 20, 1926, is the cornerstone of the U.S. federal government's regulation of civil aviation. This landmark legislation was passed at the urging of the aviation industry, whose leaders believed the airplane could not reach its full commercial potential without federal action to improve and maintain safety standards. "
Maybe people were smarter in the '20s, maybe they were hoping for regulatory capture? Not sure, but obviously it's a good thing...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aviation_Administrat...
In fairness, if you've only seen it in marketing materials, you haven't seen it.
"It can't be before 2015, because that's the earliest that we can get the rules from the FAA. But it could be 4 or 5 years."
- 10 mile radius from Amazon FC
- half hour delivery
- Objects up to 5 lbs, which is 86% of items Amazon delivered at that time
Said the biggest problems were redundancy, reliability, and safety
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/amazon-ceo-unveils-drone-deliv...
https://www.manna.aero/ https://www.flyzipline.com/ https://wing.com/ https://corporate.walmart.com/newsroom/2022/05/24/were-bring...
Several more out there still from the initial bust.
Regulations make it challenging for beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) autonomous delivery, particularly in the US with the FAA. Also, it's a hard problem in autonomy to nail it every time despite advancements. Less than 1% failure is still potentially catastrophic when you're carrying a few pounds of lithium batteries above people's backyards.
Video here of 1 weekend of deliveries-: https://youtu.be/0lFT_K47Pa4
Love the hardware design and the no-nonsense "get it done" with continuous drone operations in Europe. Things for us to aspire towards as another drone (non-delivery) company.
Basically Amazon is massively hampered by FAA regulations that say they can't fly drones beyond operator line of sight. In other words, the remote pilot must be able to see the drone at all times. It's also that drone delivery was never meant to replace all deliveries. It's only specific use cases where it is economical, such as delivery to a lone, rural house, where sending a car would be time consuming and expensive. You can get waivers for the line of sight rule but it requires sophisticated auto-avoidance tech that they're still working on (that must handle automated avoidance in rain or shine, night and day, clouds or not, winds and so on). So it's massively hard problem that was never meant to be a whole "wave" of next gen delivery.
Since then e.g. Amazon is stíll nominally pursuing it, but here's a recent article about how that's going: https://www.businessinsider.com/faa-restrictions-are-curtail...
Sending life-saving medicine to a remote township with a drone makes sense. Drone-drop pizzas do not, given planetary circumstances. For that matter, neither does the whole institution of single-meal delivery.
Perhaps more importantly, there's too much that could go wrong. What about legislation where they may fly and how high? What if a drone crashes into someone or something? What if someone's package gets stolen?
As much as the technology enthusiasts in us enjoy the concept of delivery drones, most of us humans still prefer a fellow human in the process of delivering packages to handle edge cases where things might go wrong.
For example, how many people would have to hear the drone zipping by to deliver someone some hair scrunchies or paperclips or whatever? The asymmetry makes no sense to me long before you get into the other issues.
The point of the thing is to have an impossibile to achieve project that is nonetheless popular enough to generate endless rounds of new investment.
Not groceries, but blood delivery in Africa is a thing
His teaser for the article also had a more detailed story about how he kept on getting human drivers delivering him milk teas when he wanted a drone, but that might just be an aside about the cost of human labor in China and how the system schedules the delivery method.
If you need a designated pickup point, it would seem like the already-existing Amazon pickup box system would be a better choice.
They definitely felt like the future when they first arrived, zipping along the pavement or waiting patiently to cross a road. My daughter loves counting them as we drive past.
And drone delivery is quite successful at Ukraine...
One thing that I think would be interesting is "hybrid" drone delivery: A delivery truck could drive to a central location, and then a "swarm" of drones could drop off packages at homes within a small radius.
Currently there's approvals in limited areas in the US for testing, and several companies are approved for significant steps towards our shared dream of 5 minute burrito deliveries to our back patios. Nobody has gotten approved for blanket deliveries yet; the safety levels aren't quite there.
Plug: End State Solutions consults and supports companies in developing the conops, safety case, and approval packages. Reach out once your drone company has a design you're ready to freeze for the approval process and we'll help you out. Our team got Insitu and Matternet the first ever commercial UAS type certificates issued by the FAA.
- despite the sky being generally less constrained than ground delivery there are challenging obstructions, which are potentially far more risky than for ground travel: nudge past many ground obstructions you'd be okay, do the same in the sky, your drone is toast
- liability is far greater in the sky if your drone carrying something comes down in an uncontrolled manner (on someone or something)
- obstructions are likely to be high at the very points people are willing to come meet the drone (antennas, overhead power lines, washing lines, nets, etc) and they're often hard to spot
- unattended drop off is harder for drones in the places where customers are most dense (ie cities) upping the complexity further
- potential regulatory issues (but I understand below certain heights it's generally not regulated in many countries)
- bad PR from noisy drones!
- risks from non customers interfering
- challenges with carrying what you're dropping off: if it's heavy you need bigger drones; if it's light you'd be tying up a drone with something small, unless you can figure how to drop off multiple items, or you have a mixture of drone sizes
They all seem like they could plausibly be solved but I'm no drone engineer!
Maybe it could get going with targeting particular items that are strongly appealing to customers and might narrow the complexities due to being more uniform than a random Amazon basket. I believe an early use in Bhutan was for medical deliveries. Maybe something premium like ice-cream or cocktails might appeal with the right marketing?!
Anything I get frozen gets sent in a relatively big box with dry ice or ice packs.
Doing about 300 flights a day now in DUblin, and expanding soon to 1,000 a day.
Video of a weekends worth of deliveries here-: https://youtu.be/0lFT_K47Pa4
1) They’re expanding the delivery territory.
2) They’re still using pilots with line of sight to make the delivery.
I think that’s odd. Maybe someone is moving the goalposts, or maybe there’s not a clear roadmap to broad approval.
Aerial drone delivery however ends up requiring additional infrastructure and is far too expensive for what it's trying to accomplish, particularly because of the small payload requirements. Maybe that will change in the near future, but I still think we're a long way away.
1. Command and control - Human in the loop is still a necessity because common delivery environments are too complex for an algorithm to navigate successfully so far.
2. Energy - it takes too long to recharge a drone battery pack. Flying is very energy intensive and there just isn't a way to refuel fast enough from the hub for this to make sense yet. The tested, working alternative is to use a two stroke engine but the pollution per mile from those is astronomical.
Reliable ground based sensors are an important area being addressed.
https://twitter.com/thehbarbull/status/1659167041062944770/m...
Now that labor is even less readily available we're talking about it... less. And that's even off that back of low interest rates and easier money for such initiatives.
checking wildlife with lower impact, finding wildlife and feral animals and lost hikers -check
taking aerial photos for weddings and documentaries -check
routine, bladerunner-esque floods of drones sending me parcels.. un-checked.
Here's the tl;dr:
The "last foot" problem is the biggest killer. Getting a drone into the air and to its target is not the hard problem - getting a package safely to the ground at someone's home is.
It would require either a very specific neighborhood or a big advance in computer vision and AI tech.
Where we have seen success in this space are places with dedicated delivery zones in controlled environments where existing transport infrastructure is not a good alternative.
Also this quote: "most people are simply willing to wait two or three days to receive their package while ALL customers wants their packages delivered as cheaply and simply as possible."
Uber eats and door dash largely solve the problem that drone delivery was supposed to solve and if you're going to have autonomous delivery doing it via ground robots is much easier than trying to do it from a drone.
Only takes one not following rules.
There are a few things where you could expect some progress to happen over time:
- FAA regulations are evolving and called out as an obstacle. But that's just the US of course. Keep an eye on countries like China which is in any case where a lot of the components are being developed. They are not waiting for FAA approval over there. And that's also the reason you can expect the FAA to be adapting over time.
- Cost is a big factor. The war time use of drones is a case where the use case justifies a higher cost as it means exposing less humans to enemy fire. Losses are high and yet it seems a highly successful niche use for drones even with the current state of the art in technology. Drones are being used successfully in places like the Ukraine, Yemen, and in other conflict zones. As cost comes down, that also opens up more civilian use cases.
- Battery tech is improving. CATL recently launched a 500wh/kg battery product intended for drone companies. Mass production of these is probably going to be a few years down the line. But the technology is shipping this year and not just some proof of concept kind of thing. For most current drones, that would be a doubling of battery capacity; which is a big deal of course. Bigger batteries are under development by a range of companies. Higher capacity, faster charging, lower cost, etc. batteries are coming to market.
- Several cities now have autonomous taxis. Both inside and outside the US. China especially seems very bullish and aggressive on this front. Mostly that's aimed at human transport but the extension to goods delivery seems like it's a logical next step. This stuff seems to be ramping up in more and more cities over the next decade or so.
- A lot of factories already deploy autonomous vehicles on factory floors. Particularly automotive companies have been investing in this. Mostly that's about delivering parts in the workplace.
- Companies like Tesla, Boston Dynamics, etc. have been developing autonomous robots that can move around and operate in more chaotic places. It seems like these could ultimately also get involved in delivery use cases.
So, the future is coming. It might not be in the form some people are expecting. Or happening at the (unrealistic) pace they seem to be expecting it. Hardware just isn't like software. It takes time to develop and it takes more time to ramp up manufacturing. And you don't do that before you have a market. The road from a handful to hundreds to thousands to hundreds of thousands units is just very long and not a straight line.
There is a lot of stuff happening right now. And we're past the point where you can dismiss a lot of this stuff as impossible because there are countless working proofs of concept and real world products challenging that notion already.
It only takes one not following the rules.
There were also a lot of efforts at more rural delivery schemes but mostly they’re working with quadcopter or hybrid designs which requires a ton of mass being dedicated to power. This restricts your flight time to about 30min and payload to a couple pounds (with some trade off function allowing more or less of one or the other). Even without regulation this means your delivery radius is on the order of a couple miles which means you’re competing against getting in the car or waiting a day.
I think the drone delivery concept is (without magic batteries) DOA if you’re talking about electric powered drones to areas that already have good 0-2 day options to get the thing you’re talking about delivering.
Using gas powered autonomous drones to deliver large payloads to remote areas with decent landing spots seems viable. I’m working on an air to ground glider drone prototype that can maybe be useful for “too far/logistically difficult for fast ground delivery but doesn’t have a prepared strip” but that requires being dropped from an aircraft so it needs to be worth the fractional cost of the flight etc.
Tl;dr: The power required to fly things, battery power density, and the geographical distribution of demand for delivery don’t seem to love each other.
From https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Kiwibots-win-fa...
> The Kiwibots do not figure out their own routes. Instead, people in Colombia, the home country of Chavez and his two co-founders, plot “waypoints” for the bots to follow, sending them instructions every five to 10 seconds on where to go
> On the ground in Berkeley, people also do a lot of robot support. Traveling at 1 to 1½ mph, the bots would take too long to chug to local restaurants, so Kiwi workers pick up the food at restaurants and take it via bikes or scooters to meeting spots around campus to insert into an insulated bag in the bots’ storage compartment.
> The average distance a robot covers for a delivery is about 200 meters (656 feet, or one-eighth of a mile) which makes them fall short of a “last-mile” solution.
It's just wildly inefficient, and will never see serious usage outside of tiny niches. Not until we get science fiction antigravity or tiny fusion reactors or something.
I'm not sure the laws of physics are on the side of the status quo here.
The economics are totally different, though. The "product" is very high value and has a short shelf life, so being able to deliver it quickly is a big benefit.
On top of that, using a fixed-wing delivery vehicle and launching it with a human-powered slingshot makes it actually reasonably energy-efficient.
Maybe it's my proximity to large bodies of water, but there are many island communities where I live that have limited (or no) road access requiring either a very out-of-the-way route to reach a destination or -- worse -- a ferry. A trip out to some communities could be the difference between a mile travel by air vs 10 miles travel by vehicle.
That's an extreme outlier, obviously, but if you dial that back a bit and use, say, "a trip from my home to my girlfriend's" which involves working around two rivers that roads only cross at certain points, the difference is 5 miles "as the crow flies" vs almost 14 miles of windy roads.
When all of the other problems are worked out, a drone delivery service could augment regular delivery to reduce costs/improve delivery time for products.
I think products that greatly benefit from improved delivery time, though, is the place where drone delivery can be successful. It's currently being used in some countries for blood/medical deliveries and that was the first thing that came to mind when I thought of places where drone delivery would be able to be compete/displace existing providers.
I had a friend who flew a helicopter for a company that moved people/organs/other emergency-releated activities for hospitals. Organ transplants, as I understand them, are extremely time-sensitive. One day he was called on to deliver a liver from a hospital nearby to a hospital mid-state for a waiting patient. Weather, wind, clouds and other variables were excellent; he was on-call and a ways out but made it. Shortly after take-off the helicopter suffered a failure (memory escapes me), it crashed resulting in the death of my friend, (I think) a passenger and ultimately the patient waiting for the organ.
This was 20-ish years ago and in the time since then it was discovered that part of the pre-flight check was skipped and IIRC[0] the crash was determined to be related to condensation in the fuel tank or something along those lines -- basically, he was on-call with a tight delivery schedule and cut a corner to account for the time it took him to get to the hospital for the delivery.
Drone delivery would improve several things in this model. The most obvious one being "no dead pilot or passenger" when something goes awry. If we're "flying things around" especially using small aircraft and GA pilots, there's going to be crashes -- drones or people involved -- it's a guarantee. Using drones would enable deliveries to take place without delays involved in "waking up a pilot on-call/waiting for their arrival" -- allowing hospital staff to prepare the delivery vehicle, make a call, and hand off to a remote drone pilot to get it to its destination. Assuming software/user interfaces can make piloting a drone remotely as safe as flying a helicopter "in person", the benefits would be enough to offset the higher delivery costs.
[0] I tried to find a reference online to refresh my memory but was unable so forgive my memory if I've got some details wrong here.
ooh ooh! When people say reporting can be racist, this is a perfect example! Including extra negative details that are not pertinent to the story at all.
Imagine if every story about a US company mentioned started with, "The new startup, which is based in the United States (home of Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy)..."
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy#Guilt_by_a...
SFChronicle could have instead opened with: "people in Colombia (a country with free childcare)" or "people in Colombia (a country that has worked to eliminate childhood hunger)", but, instead, blatant racism!
From your examples I assume you thought they were talking about the Chavez from Venezuela? I don't know of any other Chavez that could get that kind of reaction. Anyway, unless I've missed something, that hair trigger might need some adjustment.
If Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy founded a company together then your headline would make sense, but I don't understand why this would compare to anything the author of this article wrote.
It seems you may be the one having issues with race.
Hold your excitement. Chavez is the CEO.
