Both when I read this and when I heard amazon's announcement, I, like most people I see here, thought about the "get whatever I order off the internet to my doorstep, asap" use case--and I think that's still a ways off (because of the 0.01% edge cases, the regulation, etc).
But the use case that this article touched on, which to me was a "ah ha! we could do that today" is the case where the sending and receiving parties are more fixed (not just any random person's door), where they could actually build a drone-pad (like a heli-pad, but much more basic), where you could program in all of the specific obstacles on the route (exactly where, if there are electrical lines, what flight pattern to take, etc), and where you could train both the sender and receiver, and cord off the landing area (so you'd never run into the random guy or dog tries to grab the drone problem)
examples:
* delivery of medical supplies/medicine to a facility in a very remote area where it would not make sense to stock the items there permanently.
* very expensive restaurant at a ski resort in the middle of Colorado that gets a drone delivery of fresh seafood from a CA pier every day (an existing business transaction they do anyway that could be done faster, more efficiently than a human operated aircraft)
* the delivery of anything else to a ski resort (you have very wealthy people wanting things in a very remote location)
* something on top of a cruise ship, for medical items or whatever other thing a passenger really needed while at sea.
* something at the Ebola treatment areas right now in Africa.
I used to work for a BioMedical company that paid $500 a trip for guaranteed couriers to pick up plasma from a medical facility and get it to an airport (in a short time frame) to be shipped half-way across the country, where the same thing had to happen in reverse... The treatment they performed on the plasma cost the patient $15k, and there were several times where a helicopter was brought in to navigate around gridlock, as the cost of a second treatment was an order of magnitude greater.
Something like this would be incredible for allowing access to specialized medicines at drastically lower costs. There were many locations that they were unable to get guaranteed couriers, and hence couldn't offer their treatment at any price...
Or reinvent the trusty old mailbox as a drop zone for drones. Google can't realistically handle all the edge cases so crowdsource the edge case resolution to the owner of each house. They can decide where they want to put their drop zone containers. The design of the drop zone container can be optimized to stand out on CV algos which the drone can then use to home in for delivery. This also works in multi-story apartments where there's a common drop zone for the entire apartment and it's left to the residents to sort it to the appropriate owners.
I wonder if it's possible to design a drop chute instead of a drop zone container so that the drone never needs to do the winch thing; the drone drops the package into the chute at it's current hover height and takes off while the chute takes care of slowing the package down to the ground.
In any case, this is an exciting area ripe for experimentation and bold ideas.
> the drone drops the package into the chute at it's current hover height and takes off while the chute takes care of slowing the package down to the ground.
Skip hover, we don't need 10cm accuracy yet.
What's the cheapest way I can deliver one or multiple payloads from a fixed wing aircraft at 5000 feet to a 100x100 ft 'package' zone with 99.9% accuracy? (in any weather condition).
we grow quickly by letting people with big backyards sign up to be the delivery zone, then manage the last miles on their own.
Yeah, personally if it meant I could get packages shipped to me more cheaply/quickly/reliably, then I would definitely be motivated to minimally modify my "house" to make it more palatable to the delivery drones.
Also it may help to increase data transfer bandwidth (but not latency) for large backups if it transports hard drives. :) Especially because SSDs are so light. But the packet loss could be risky if somebody founds your packet and it's not encrypted.
Deliveries are still a pain right now because you have to be present at the destination to receive the package. Or you have to fetch the package yourself at a designed location. I believe that a lot of Internet sales are lost to local businesses because of that.
In the future it will be common for homes to have a drop point that accepts larger parcels than mail. It will be a feature that people are going to look for when renting/buying homes. With that in place and a good standard drone delivery will also become more practical for the last mile.
Ideally someone would step up and develop a standard similar to what happened to shipping containers. That would help the adoption tremendously.
Do we need a standard? We could do this now. Just put something like a postbox at your front door where you can put parcels in, but not out (without a key).
From what I have seen people do arrange drop points once they get to know the delivery guy. If the guy leaves to another location it has to be arranged again with the new guy.
By having a standard UPS/.. could be notified that you have a "A1" container available. Any parcel that fits in that container can be delivered without arranging a meeting time.
It could be done today in rural households but in cities, room would need to be made for these new containers.
Delivery of lots of things for search and rescue operations would probably be pretty useful, if somewhat niche.
I've heard of quite a few S&R stories where they knew where the person was but couldn't safely get there until daylight. It seems like being able to drop off a care package in such situations would be useful.
In some situations like harsh cold snowy weather a drone is unlikely to be of much use, but dropping a couple of liters of water to someone stuck overnight in the desert could be the difference between pulling in a dangerously dehydrated lost hiker in the morning versus picking up someone who just needs a lift back to civilization.
Of course, drones (even sans delivery ability) seem like a good fit for S&R anyway -- relatively cheap (compared to manned helicopter searches) and safe way to cover last known areas of missing folks to try to locate them from the air.
One of the cases the MatterNet folks are considering is the rapid movement of medical samples from, eg a mobile clinic to a central laboratory.
It has the added advantage of being high-importance but low-cash-value, reducing any incentive from (hypothetical) drone-nappers and making the experience a positive one for the general public in the area of operation.
It is difficult to imagine how those examples could be accomplished using a drone alone (with limited range and capacity). I think that delivery automation is a good idea but it must be very difficult to link up disperate types of service without relying on massive monolithic courier companies.
How about a "drone pony express" where carrier has a bunch of intermediate stations within range of each other based on the drone's capability; the package is handed off from the "tired" drone to the the "fresh" drone, and the "tired" drone is hooked up to a charging station.
The key differentiator to Amazon (and most any other delivery drone system I've seen) is that this is a tailsitter: it takes off vertically, and can hover in place for deliveries, but it flies horizontally.
RC planes get a lot more flight time than RC helis of equivalent gas/battery power. And the horizontal distance they can cover is better as well. You're right this is different, though it shouldn't be too hard for Amazon to transition to wings instead of rotors (though the control mechanics are somewhat different as well).
I also wonder if the Google drone uses a symmetric airfoil (no lift at level flight) like the QuadShot, or if they use a standard wing design. The symmetric airfoil obviously makes control easier when in vertical (quadrotor) flight, but loses efficiency and stability in horizontal (plane) flight.
I have a QuadShot and it's not too difficult to control. I think with a good control system the airframe could work pretty well. The QuadShot is quite lightweight, has all its mass centered, and has a pretty large wing cross-section which makes it difficult to fly in the wind though. I also don't feel that the QuadShot's firmware was ever quite nailed down completely - I feel that there's still a lot more stability to be gained by tweaking PIDs and improving the control system, or by adding additional inputs like optical flow.
The Google device probably benefits a lot from being bigger as it's difficult to substitute for inertia.
I've never flown a QuadShot though I recently (last weekend) saw one flown at Baylands park down in Sunnyvale. I noticed it never really looked like the pilot was "in control"
The military unmanned delivery aircraft are all tail sitters (500 pound payloads). I hope Google's drafting behind all the existing R&D there. The military stuff out there is crazy - hummingbird-size ornithopters, 2 ounce helicopters that can fly for 30 minutes with an encrypted HD video uplink, etc.,
> The only reason for tilt-rotors is when you need to keep the main body of the aircraft level.
Actually, a tilt-rotor can be manipulated to make the aircraft go where you want it to. The same idea explains how helicopters make their way across the landscape.
Former Amazonian here. If anyone wants to understand the key difference between Amazon and Google culture there's a great quote in the article.
"In all the testing, Roy had never seen one of his drones deliver a package. He was always at the takeoff point, watching debugging information scroll up the screen, and anxiously waiting to see what would happen. “Sergey [Brin] has been bugging me, asking, ‘What is it like? Is it actually a nice experience to get this?’ and I’m like, ‘Dude, I don’t know. I’m looking at the screen,’” Roy told me."
Google and Amazon are both great companies. But at Amazon the drone program would start with a description of what the customer experience is when they receive a drone delivery and you'd work backwards to the technology solution. At Google the technology precedes the customer experience.
"Another obvious idea is to simply land the craft, drop the package, and then take off again. To test the premise, they brought in some of Google’s user experience researchers who queried people about how they might react to such a delivery. What they found was that individuals could not be stopped from trying to reach for their packages, even if they were told that the rotors on the vehicle were dangerous, which they are."
I have worked for neither company but I use products and services from both daily and I have to say I disagree. And remember the Prime Air demo video that showed a drone landing in a yard? And when your dog thinks it's a great new toy and runs up to it? Or your kid?... I have to say they didn't really think that experience through before taking it to the press.
While the hardware is a significant part of the problem, they seem largely agnostic about which flying machine might ultimately serve their needs best. The real challenges, Teller and Roy insist, come in the design of the rest of the system like, for example, the delivery mechanism.
For example, the reason they do the winch down thing, instead of just landing, is so that customers are not tempted to approach the drone and get hit by the rotors.
touching a rotor chops your hand off. Getting hit in the head by delivery of dog food kills you. It's kinetic vs potential energy. for your kinetic energy equation you need a lot of speed and a lot of mass. You can have one of those, but not both.
I don't think so. I can almost hear Jeff's voice...
"Don't make your problem the customer's problem!"
There are often many technical solutions to create a particular customer experience. Jeff never accepts false dichotomies. If the particular technical solution being considered fails to produce a delightful customer experience then you better start thinking about other solutions. Many of the projects on which I worked turned out much better when Jeff challenged us break out of our little technical boxes and consider alternate solutions that preserved the customer experience.
I can sense that my answer will be frustrating to some who don't like being told that they aren't thinking big enough / creatively enough / bold enough / outside the box enough. Believe me, I felt that way too when working on Jeff projects. I left his office in frustration many times only to realize several hours or days later that I would have been better served by focusing on creative problem solving instead of trying to convince Jeff that X was not possible.
I have immense respect for Jeff. I also have increased respect for Sergy because he appears to be asking the right types of questions at Google.
> at Amazon the drone program would start with .. the customer experience ... and you'd work backwards to the technology solution. At Google the technology precedes the customer experience.
This seems to happen frequently with some of the largest tech companies. I'm reminded of how Apple was developing a tablet computer, what would eventually become the iPad, far before anyone was thinking about multi-touch interfaces (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad#History). They spent almost 10 years in R&D before they were able to put something out there, and even longer before they could actually ship the iPad. It's a good thing they wasted all that money, because it ended up paying off.
I think Google, Amazon and even Microsoft are hedging similar bets against the limits of technology. After all, what's impossible today may be trivial tomorrow.
> far before anyone was thinking about multi-touch interfaces
CERN built capacitive multi-touch displays in the 70s. Mitsubishi, Bell, Microsoft, IBM and a bunch of other companies were involved in the R&D from there.
What Apple are good at is integrating and commercializing at the exact point where the economies of scale are viable, adding a layer of accessibility for users (eg. inventing the gestures, but not the touch technology itself).
The anecdote about how Apple tried to launch the iPad before the iPhone is proof that they didn't catch-on to how the core touch tech scaled (every inch of touch surface would increase production cost non-linearly) until much later.
Well, I think starting with the experience first gives you a clear indication if this is worthwhile or not. Once you decide if it is worthwhile then you can go back to the technology and determine if it is feasible.
> at Amazon the drone program would start with a description of what the customer experience is when they receive a drone delivery and you'd work backwards to the technology solution
"work backwards to the technology" is a quote from Steve Jobs:
> One of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. — http://youtu.be/GnO7D5UaDig?t=52m16s
That a quote like that should be attributed to Amazon shows how much Jeff is trying to emulate Steve.
I'm not sure that Australia has "progressive" rules about the use of drones by design. More likely it's just that the government hasn't yet got around to putting rules in place. Mind you, the more high-level drone research we have going on here, the more examples there will be to counter attempts to impose crazy rules.
Also worth noting is that Australia has a "UAV Outback Challenge" [1], where UAVs compete to carry out a simulated rescue of a tourist lost in the outback. This September the challenge is in Kingaroy, Queensland. (Maybe that's why Google is testing up that way??) Of further interest, there's at least one open source team competing in the UAV challenge [2].
Australia does have better rules than the US - it is possible (although not easy) to operate a drone company in Australia. In the US it's still legally problematic.
In the US its still legally impossible. Only public entities like police or universities can get legal permission to fly an unmanned aircraft. (BP/Aeovironment got the only approval that's been issued to private companies)
While I find this technologically interesting, I wonder if a drone bucket brigade might not be a better use for a technology that can pick up 10 lbs at point A and drop it over point B. A five thousand such drones, even at $10,000 each or $50M could keep 3,000 gallons of water[1] per (speed/distance) seconds dropping continuously on a wildfire.
The current quads/drones have problems with naturally occurring thermals in calm weather and the slightest winds - they don't come close to surviving the climate surrounding a wild fire.
When the tech and price scale are right for this application, you'll definitely see it as it has been discussed and is actively being worked on.
I can't say anything about wild fire conditions, but even a decent hobbyist drone will not have problems with thermals in calm weather or slight winds. A commercial drone will be even better.
"On the 18 of January 2003, a supercell thunderstorm formed from a pyrocumulonimbus cloud associated with a severe wildfire, during the 2003 Canberra bushfires in Canberra, Australia. The supercell resulted in a huge fire tornado, rated at EF3 on the fujita scale, the first confirmed violent fire tornado. The tornado and associated fire killed 4 people and injured 492."
Now I know the third movie in the Sharknado series, Sharknado vs Firenado.
That is an interesting link. Reading about the Australian fires an interesting question comes to mind which is this, "If we engaged these fires at the outset with a constant suppression/extinguishing scheme, would they still get to the size and ferocity that they do today?" that is something I don't know. CalFire jumps on fires pretty quickly to keep them under control, especially near structures, and those fires then evolve slowly. Unlike say the Yellowstone fire a decade or so ago which was left to burn 'naturally' and it got quite large.
The generally accepted idea of Eucalyptus fires is that you need to manage the fuel load on the ground. Regular burning off, maintenance of fire trails, clearing undergrowth around populated areas etc. is really the only way to control a plant that uses fire as part of it's reproductive cycle. Ignoring it for 10 years inevitably sets up a literally deadly fuel load which will be completely uncontrollable if it starts burning.
I grew up in the Australian bush, and it, like the Californian Eucalypt forests, is prone to burn at the slightest provocation. Add dry, windy conditions and it's a recipe for disaster.
Call up a squadron of K-Max's with a suspended water bucket and that's a very interesting experiment.
Small electric stuff will be limited by charging infrastructure and plain availability; it'd be fun to see a future where various commercial swarms exist and they're taken over for disaster relief.
"Hey, where's my burrito?"
"Sorry sir, all our BurritoCopters[tm] are attending the San Bernardino Valley Fire at the moment, per civic ordinance K-34. Your burrito's right here if you want to collect."
I'm sometimes wondering, couldn't we repurpose rockets for that? You could make some cheap water dropping short-range ballistic missiles, each carrying 200+ kg of cold water.
Or, to push this idea further, maybe we could repurpose artillery and just shoot water buckets from long range? I wonder if this or the missiles would have lower fuel cost than Skycrane or drone operations.
Rockets are inefficient atmospheric vehicles. You use rockets to get to space because you need to get out of the atmosphere as quickly as possible.
You also use them for single-use things (missiles) because the value in making a thing blow up at a distance is a lot higher (a $5 million dollar tank, for example) then the rocket itself.
But they're terrible for when you're into purely shifting mass. Air-breathing propulsion with aerofoils is absurdly better. It's why hypersonic flight and things like the Skylon are a big deal.
Artillery is an interesting one, back in the Cold War there were biological/chemical weapon 'dispersal' shells which would explode over the ground and leave a wide dispersal footprint of their chemical. Fill them with fire suppressant and shell the fire might do some good.
Agriculture is probably a better petri dish for all this technology. Farms are already dangerous, you need to cover large swaths of land, and it's unlikely that you're going to hit anything, or anyone if it falls from the sky.
That said, I could imagine a world where a FedEx drone is permitted to provide last meter service from the roof of a truck, taking the package from the street to the doorstep. Additionally, widespread use of drones may reshape where core resources are stored and allocated. In Manhattan for instance, maybe lightweight warehouses are placed on rooftops for quick deliver of common products within a few minutes of ordering.
I'm now imagining a shipping container that get floated from China to $city stacked up top on a regular container ship, then without even unloading it from the ship, the roof slides back and the walls collapse, and a flock of disposable single-use drones launches out - delivering random manufactured crap directly to the purchaser bypassing the expensive first-world logistics chain...
Customs and domestic security nightmare. Random manufactured crap could range from things that the government doesn't like (drugs) to things that might be dangerous (enriched uranium) to things that are very bad (like weaponized anthrax or the fictional Fusarium spirale[1]).
Your last part sounds like one of Bruce Schneier's Movie Plot Terrorist Threats. Mainly in the sense that weaponized biologics (threat-du-jour: Ebola; Anthrax) could already be dispersed by consumer crap coming from anywhere in the world, eg. a sticky tape containing Anthrax spores sneaked into the CPU cooling-fan assembly plant and stuck inside the vent so that every time your CPU fan runs it spews out spores. For Ebola, you just mix a few drops of the bodily fluids of a patient who died of Ebola into one of those fancy tetra-pack coconut juice boxes using a few syringes and have instant Armageddon. All of these are purely fictional scenarios, of course, but hey the three letter government agencies need to scare the shit out of the public to get increases in their funding now don't they!?!
When you mentioned the shipping container, I was thinking about a heavy lifting helicopter that plucks an entire shipping container off the cargo ship and drops it on an 18 wheeler already on a highway (or on a train already in motion...). Bypassing the bottleneck at a port could save a lot of time and money, too.
The logical next step would be to predictively send these drones up with the most likely packages that the customers could possibly order.
The mobile app would then tell you here are 50 drones with a 10 mile radius - & here is the list of items that are on them - so forget same-day delivery how about same-hour delivery?
This is basically what meal-delivery services are doing in San Francisco. They stock up on meals in delivery cars and anticipate where the demand would be and drive there.
I don't know why someone isn't driving a route in a van rigged to have curry and rice permanently cooking/warm. Different dish each night. Cheaper for advanced orders. App that tracks location of the van and handles transactions.
If Tuesday was chicken curry night and the cost reflected avoiding the variance and random delivery costs that drive up prices for other food services, I'd buy every week.
Driver plus someone to hand over the food or leave it at the door.
Great to see efforts like this not primarily focused on just delivering books or groceries but being put to the use for AID and resources that otherwise wouldn't be able to get there in a practical manner.
I'm curious what kind of running time these have though and distance they can travel. Would be great if they could just have 2-3 go for a dozen roundtrips each in circumstances like Katrina.
My feeling is that this is a 'social hack'. Talk about using the drones in special, humanitarian situations first. People will then be less likely to come out against their development and testing. Then, once you have proved the technology and it has developed some level of public trust, you can expand into other areas with broader application and greater commercial returns.
Larger sized RC planes like a Skywalker can usually run for around 40 Minutes to an hour and cover around 50 Miles in that time. There are examples of much longer flight times and longer distances but 50 miles seems about right in real world usage with a payload. As soon as it comes back you can swap out the battery and launch again, a 2 - 3 minute turnaround is easy.
Yes, there's clearly nothing stopping them from carrying a wide variety of cargo. I'm sure the drones will end up delivering both life-critical and completely frivolous packages.
What struck me about this design is that the drone is a lot less susceptible to end-user interference / damage / theft -- the drone hovers way out of reach and drops the package from a quickly-retracted line.
Interesting that they use an hoverable airplane design instead of a quadrocopter... I wonder if this is in part because a failed engine en-route is less likely to cause a human injury, since an airplane is able to glide to the ground.
The biggest advantages of a fixed wing over a quadrotor are endurance and range. A fixed wing can carry more payload with less energy. The ability to glide if the engine goes out is a bonus, but probably not the driving reason to select it as a platform.
This reminds me even more than Amazon's program of vernor vinge's prediction of rock deliveries from fedex in his short story "Fast Times at Fairmont High." There's something about a package being lowered onto my doorstep by a VTOL drone...
I think Google intentions to deliver a Drone program, are much bigger and will try to create a great value proposition for buyers to use their eCommerce solutions and payments. This way you will more eager to choose Google and not Amazon.
Could something like this eventually replace the postman? I'm thinking of something on top of your roof that could be an aerial target for the device to drop stuff onto.
When is Google going to start innovating again instead of just copying other big tech companies? They are the new Microsoft it seems like, cash cow being spent on also-rans.
Delivery was of a salami sandwich (we later cleared it out with the police).
I even gave Ryan Hickman at Google the software and hardware specs, when he was trying to fix up the Cellbots project in 2011. We were at maker faire 2011, which was funny because their android 'bot didn't work and ours did... Never heard much since, though.
Sorry for bragging, but it's a pet peeve I got. Anyway, the source and schematics are at http://obex.parallax.com/object/116 the Android side software can be had if you email me at mkb@robots-everywhere.com
Sounds fair to me :) In that case if you must downvote, downvote a post of mine that doesn't have useful/relevant content.
I know I'm burning a lot of points on this one, but the fact is, I wasn't any more of an egomaniacal ass than the guy I talked to who tried to frankly pretend my work didn't exist.
And, this site working how it does, most of the value is in the comments -- why downvote something with (maybe tangentially) related links to open source software/diagrams that other people can use? This is HACKER news, correct?
(Now watch me get downvoted to oblivion just because I am standing up for what I think and backing it up as rationally as I can manage)
We used a G1 dev phone to fly a 1.5 meter wingspan airplane. We used only sensors in the phone, camera, gps, etc.
Honestly it didn't work too well - we needed either a much better model of our airframe, an airspeed (not groundspeed) sensor or an airframe that could power through 10-15 mph winds.
In the end however, we demoed waypoint navigation and imaging the waypoint. You text it lat/long and it texts back a picture.
We did it as a proof of concept (for an interested govt agency), modern smartphones are neat, but bespoke, real-time hw, with navigation grade sensors are probably an order of magnitude more effective (though an order of magnitude more expensive).
Working with android to do robotics was.. interesting. We had to do all sorts of hacking to make the phone behave a little as possible like a phone and more like a real-time controller. What do you do when someone calls the phone while you're flying an airplane? How do you keep the phone application from taking over and exiting out of your navigation app? While the airplane is 1000 ft in the air?
What I ended up using for the ground/water stuff was sending serial commands out of the headphone jack... surprisingly low latency, especially compared to bluetooth, and it was only a few bytes at a time so low baudrate was fine.
But the use case that this article touched on, which to me was a "ah ha! we could do that today" is the case where the sending and receiving parties are more fixed (not just any random person's door), where they could actually build a drone-pad (like a heli-pad, but much more basic), where you could program in all of the specific obstacles on the route (exactly where, if there are electrical lines, what flight pattern to take, etc), and where you could train both the sender and receiver, and cord off the landing area (so you'd never run into the random guy or dog tries to grab the drone problem)
examples:
* delivery of medical supplies/medicine to a facility in a very remote area where it would not make sense to stock the items there permanently.
* very expensive restaurant at a ski resort in the middle of Colorado that gets a drone delivery of fresh seafood from a CA pier every day (an existing business transaction they do anyway that could be done faster, more efficiently than a human operated aircraft)
* the delivery of anything else to a ski resort (you have very wealthy people wanting things in a very remote location)
* something on top of a cruise ship, for medical items or whatever other thing a passenger really needed while at sea.
* something at the Ebola treatment areas right now in Africa.