Amazon's drone delivery program is the joke it always sounded like.
Amazon's drone delivery program is the joke it always sounded like.
COLLEGE STATION, Texas — Exactly a decade ago, Amazon revealed a program that aimed to revolutionize shopping and shipping. Drones launched from a central hub would waft through the skies delivering just about everything anyone could need. They would be fast, innovative, ubiquitous — all the Amazon ...
Only one item can be delivered at a time. It can’t weigh more than 5 pounds. It can’t be too big. It can’t be something breakable, since the drone drops it from 12 feet. The drones can’t fly when it is too hot or too windy or too rainy.
You need to be home to put out the landing target and to make sure that a porch pirate doesn’t make off with your item or that it doesn’t roll into the street (which happened once to Lord and Silverman). But your car can’t be in the driveway. Letting the drone land in the backyard would avoid some of these problems, but not if there are trees.
Amazon has also warned customers that drone delivery is unavailable during periods of high demand for drone delivery.
Meanwhile in Rwanda:
There have been 13,000 deliveries to date and it has been estimated Zipline drones distribute 65% of blood outside of the capital city, Kigali.
https://www.pharmaceutical-technology.com/news/zipline-ghana-medical-supplies-drones/?cf-view
Just because Amazon is doing a terrible job of it, doesn't mean it's a job that can't be done.
Ok sure, there's limitations. So what percentage of their current deliveries are actually possible with drones? If it's above 0%, then there's an opportunity.
Beyond that it's a finance/ risk/ reward/ regulation issue.
Imagine a van which drives into a suburban housing estate and instead of parking individually at different houses for 5-10 mins each, spends less than 5 mins prepping a set of drones which take off from the roof of the van and return in minutes.
It saves time and fuel. It doesn't work everywhere, but it doesn't need to.
In fact it could be the same van. Do deliveries exactly as normal, and use a drone for the last half mile when convenient. It's not either/or.
I would like to take this time to thank the slow government FAA for preventing Amazon from clogging up the airspace with crappy drones and preventing a stupid system from taking off.
Aside from all the functional downsides, I'd expect these to go the way of Tesla when hitting a larger scale. Lawsuits and traffic incidents.
Another more successful operation in Rwanda and Ghana is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipline_(drone_delivery_company) delivering 1.8kg over 300km and dropped by parachute.
Noise is absolutely a concern for flying things. The reasons we don't yet have flying cars is not because they're too expensive, but because they're too loud. And this is specifically why the FAA won't let me commute to work in an ultralight.
The police want Bladerunner spinners so bad they can taste it. And the reason they can't have them — or more helicopters — is the noise.
Welcome to the future
If I'm honest it really is not at all surprising.
Hyperloop 2.0.
Delivering something by air is the least efficient way to do so, unless it's Avdiivka and you deliver a grenade. Yeah, making them now is cheap (and we overproduce these unrecycleable toys), but what the upsides of using them instead of, like, land drones, or human workers, or some rail-system? It's cool and fancy the first time you order it, but what's the reason behind it other than our entertainment? Why not to make a delivery guy shoot fireworks once they are here - as enjoyable, and as chinese as these drones.
Why we want to produce this junk in the first place? And aren't we afraid this shit records close-ups of each property itflies over?
Assuming you live in any moderately-developed area, yeah this is kind of a useless service. But I can see this being very useful for people who need things delivered to remote or otherwise hard-to-access places where a delivery vehicle can't easily get to. Until the cost of maintaining a drone fleet drops substantially, I don't see it being more feasible than the standard delivery van service for most people, not for a while at least.
See also: Royal Mail in the UK experimenting with drones. Not doing the last miles delivery to customers, but reinforcing the network with a human still actually shoving the damp bits of paper through the door.
The program itself isn't absurd, but Amazon is a bunch of fucking clowns. I only expect them to fail in the world of logistics. But they're so big & everybody keeps giving them their money, they can do whatever they want, poorly, forever. They fail 'up'.
Drone delivery is indeed part of the future of logistics. They just need to make the drones more robust to handle slightly bigger, heavier loads, like at least 10# would be great & a reasonable goal. Arm it with AI so it knows where to drop the payload. Etc etc. There are indeed a number of kinks to be worked out....and who better to crash & burn, learn on than Amazon? 🤡
This sounds like a terrible premise for an episode of the Jetsons