Hidden Obstacles For Delivery Drones 215
An anonymous reader writes: A few days ago we talked over some of the difficulties faced by makers of autonomous car software, like dealing with weather, construction, and parking garages. Today, the NY Times has a similar article about delivery drones, examining the safety and regulatory problems that must be solved in addition to getting the basic technology ready. "[R]researchers at NASA are working on ways to manage that menagerie of low-flying aircraft. At NASA's Moffett Field, about four miles from Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., the agency has been developing a drone traffic management program that would in effect be a separate air traffic control system for things that fly low to the ground — around 400 to 500 feet for most drones. Much like the air traffic control system for conventional aircraft, the program would monitor the skies for weather and traffic. Wind is a particular hazard, because drones weigh so little compared with regular planes." Beyond that, the sheer scale of infrastructure necessary to get drone delivery up and running in cities across the U.S. is staggering. Commercial drones aren't going to have much range, particularly when carrying something heavy. They'll be noisy, and the products they're transporting will still need to be relatively close by. What other issues do Amazon, DHL, Google, and other need to solve?
Hijacking and theft (Score:2)
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How will the drones ensure that the recipient is the correct person?
They don't. Neither does a human delivery person. I have never been asked for an ID to receive a package, and most don't even ask for a signature.
And how will they protect themselves against other people or drones stealing the cargo?
They don't. Neither does a human delivery person when they leave a package on he porch, or in the mailbox.
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I've had goods delivered worth hundreds and not even have to sign off for it. (not that those scribbles are worth much IMHO, I've never understood why they don't require a picture of the person accepting the goods... heck, have them hold the package with the label clearly visible, should make denial-ability (sp?) much more cumbersome than it is now)
I've also had goods delivered worth peanuts that required showing my ID and the person in charge copying the number on some form and then me having to sign it.
Co
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I've had goods delivered worth hundreds and not even have to sign off for it. (not that those scribbles are worth much IMHO, I've never understood why they don't require a picture of the person accepting the goods... heck, have them hold the package with the label clearly visible, should make denial-ability (sp?) much more cumbersome than it is now)
They deliberately don't bother with such a high level of security because most of the time it isn't worth it. From a business point of view it's better to keep times spent on deliveries as short as possible until you have a loss somewhere, and from that point on that one address gets a little more attention from the driver.
If you read the T&Cs they only guarantee to get "a signature", not actually deliver the package to a specific person most of the time. As long as someone signed for it it's your probl
Please do (Score:2)
That will be one more gun-toting idiot either financially destitute or behind bars. $100,000 and 20 years is the maximum federal penalty for firing on a commercial aircraft. Lock and load, baby!
The main problem: they don't make sense (Score:2, Insightful)
The main problem is the overall uneconomical and generally nonsensical idea of using delivery drones. Trucks are simple and work well in bad weather. There's a huge non-employed workforce of people who can easily be trained to deliver packages. Delivery trucks can be powered by natural gas, which is so abundant that many oil rigs simply burn it off rather than going to the trouble of capturing it.
in the general case, delivery drones don't work. Trucks do.
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Further to this. If we do see self driving vehicles any time soon I would have thought that would have been infinitely preferable to drones. Some kind of system that gets you to meet the truck - calling or texting minutes before arrival. A bay that only has your parcel in it.
A lot of parcels are shipped in standard boxes these days so that shouldn't be too difficult a system to build. It wouldn't replace a driver with odd or bulky parcels of course.
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Have a look at the time-frame for automobiles. Then extrapolate. Result: In 30-50 years we may have drone-delivery, but not much sooner. And if you make that "flying cars", "never" sounds about right.
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Now, what's wrong with zero-wheeled vehicles, ah, wait, that would be too similar to a drone to fit into your world view.
Property rights (Score:2)
It's bad enough that someone can fly over your house at high altitude without you receiving any compensation, but, a bunch of drones added to the mix just undermines your own property rights.
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It's bad enough people can walk past my driveway without compensation! I may not own the footpath but its crossing in front of my driveway!
Those companies operating their pesky satellites orbiting overhead should be compensating me too.
Don't get me started when the moon goes over head!
You never bought the airspace above your house. It's not on the title of your property. Shut the fuck up you useless hick.
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Why are you so quick to give away for free something that a major corporation will make tons of money on? That transit conduit has a value and it is only because of government that I cannot get some value out of it. You can call me a hick all that you want, and maybe I am, but you're the one advocating a system where people are going to use a resource that you possess, for free, and without even a shred of protest. "Here Amazon, go ahead and make billions of dollars flying drones 500 feet above my house,
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It's only because of the government that you cannot get value out of it?
It's only because of the government that you have your property in the first place. You bought the land in exchange for certain rights. Why do you expect additional rights for free?
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You never bought the airspace above your house.
You are wrong about that. I cannot legally build my house right over your house, even if it never touches the ground that you bought.
Clearly, airlines are flying above without considering property rights below, so somewhere "your" airspace ends, but just because it's in the air doesn't mean it doesn't touch property rights.
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The various flight ceilings on commercial aviation might speak to that, but I seriously doubt any court is going to interpret the law as being about property rights as opposed to public safety / nuisance.
You have all sorts of protections from things that never touch your property, but they're definitely not defined by the property boundaries. For instance you can't demand that soundwaves do not enter your premises at all - instead you can possibly get a neighbours air conditioner moved so it isn't above a c
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there are no set boundaries on airspace in property. What there is, is reasonable use of airspace such that it does not interfere with others' use of the same airspace. For example, zoning laws mean that buildings are restricted in terms of height (more to do with the density of the ground than what the airspace is used for), but there are some circumstances, such as near airports, that clearly define for reasons of safety, where building construction may *not* encroach, such as approach lanes and ILS beam
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I cannot legally build my house right over your house, even if it never touches the ground that you bought.
I don't see the point here. Even if we assume I don't own air rights above my house, that doesn't mean that you do.
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Your airspace does end somewhere [wikipedia.org].
The law, in balancing the public interest in using the airspace for air navigation against the landowner's rights, declared that a landowner owns only so much of the airspace above their property as they may reasonably use in connection with their enjoyment of the underlying land.
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We may need some new laws regulating things like tethered balloons and kites though. Currently anyone can buy one and set it up in their back yard, but if drones become popular they could end up being like those anti-aircraft balloons used in WW2.
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I bet you wanted to sue Apollo astronauts for trespassing because was the moon was clearly above your house.
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There's actually an international treaty that prohibits countries from claiming property rights on celestial bodies due to their being in space. By signing that treaty, countries agreed that the property of space effectively belongs to the United Nations or whatever treaty body controls claims for it. But yes, suing for space is ridiculous, but, is noise pollution for airlines flying above your house as ridiculous? What about drones flying 500 feet overhead, or even 100 feet? I think as a property owner
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Ultimately, your property "rights" are granted rights, not inalienable or natural rights. You don't own air rights or mineral rights for simple, pragmatic reasons.
Hell, by international convention "conquest" is the most sure-fire way to get more real estate.
As for noise pollution - people have been suing over that since the dawn of aviation. Sometimes they win, and sometimes they lose (hard to prove harm if you bought a house near an existing airport...). Over the years, we've made jets quieter, we've restr
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Ultimately, your property "rights" are granted rights, not inalienable or natural rights.
You mean, just like all so-called "rights"?
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there is nobody stopping you from operating your own drone over your own land, as long as you don't cause a nuisance to others. Their enjoyment of the airspace over your land comes with the same condition: that they don't cause a nuisance to you.
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...a bunch of drones added to the mix just undermines your own property rights....
Of course, that depends upon the altitude of the drones.
.
If they're flying at 50 feet, there is a definite issue.
So the question becomes, how high do the drones have to fly before the issues they raise become moot?
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You want that slice of the universe over your house as well? Then better start policing it, if you can....
Weight (Score:2)
"Wind is a particular hazard, because drones weigh so little compared with regular planes"
I'm not so sure about this one. A 747 in a 20 mph cross wind does 20 mph sideways. A drone in a 20 mph cross wind does 20 mph sideways.
When there is a gust (or any change in wind speed), there would be a difference. An object with a lot of mass will react more slowly to the same force. That said, once a 747 starts blowing sideways in the wind, making a correction is going to take more time and a larger force that i
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"Wind is a particular hazard, because drones weigh so little compared with regular planes."
Small drones don't have much inertia. They can be easily flipped by a small local wind gust. This is a big problem for drones that operate close to buildings, where there are eddies and turbulence as air hits the building. Pass the corner of a building and the wind situation may be completely different.
Very smart and aggressive stability control systems are able to overcome this. See this drone from PSI Tactical [psitactical.com], which weighs about 0.5Kg and is supposed to be able to operate in winds up to 30MPH.
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Good points. I think the key concept is called Wing Loading [wikipedia.org] which is the ratio of mass to wing area. For example [wikipedia.org]:
Effect on stability
Wing loading also affects gust response, the degree to which the aircraft is affected by turbulence and variations in air density. A small wing has less area on which a gust can act, both of which [I think they are referring to low area and high mass] serve to smooth the ride. For high-speed, low-level flight (such as a fast low-level bombing run in an attack aircraft), a small, thin, highly loaded wing is preferable: aircraft with a low wing loading are often subject to a rough, punishing ride in this flight regime.
IOW, what matters is the ratio of the mass to the wing area and not just the mass (weight) with no context. For example, if you have two round rocks of roughly the same mass and tie a very light wing to one of them (which makes the masses equal). The one with the wing will be more affected by gusts even though the masses are the same.
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when the max speed of said drone is 21mph while it can just maintain the altitude then a wind of 23 becomes quite problematic especially if it transitions to it quickly.
Why use drones at all? (Score:2)
Drones seem un-necessary. Why the return trip? Why not make the delivery vehicle....a "smart-bomb". A delivery vehicle that could be dropped from a [very] large plane and that descends in a very controlled fall to its destination. Maybe homing in on GPS, or using a small camera.. It would have just enough smarts to control its descent and make adjustments, but be disposable otherwise. Or tough enough to ship back to Amazon by "ground" shipping.
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just too many issues (Score:2)
people in apartments or yards of an inappropriately small size, or with too many overhanging trees, will be blacklisted as the things crash repeatedly, they'll default to truck delivery.
an equation of range vs weight will be used that ends up defaulting anything but a friggn' bottle opener to truck delivery.
during questionable weather, shipments will be heavily delayed until the weather clears, and they'll default to truck delivery.
bird flys into your shipment. kid throws a rock at it. whatever. re-shipm
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or with too many overhanging trees, [...] people (including me) will order $5 packages, wait for them to arrive, then steal the 'copter for parts. no real way to prove it didn't just crash, right?
Which is why Googles system (lowering the parcel on a rope, the drone never comes even near ground) is superior to Amazons (land-and-release) system.
In general, though, I do agree with you.
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(lowering the parcel on a rope, the drone never comes even near ground)
Until I grab the rope and pull the UAV to the ground.
Monitoring the sky 500 feet up? (Score:2)
Seems impossible. This would have to be some peer-to-peer/mesh network model of traffic control. I hope they aren't really planning on using ground-based radar for this. It would require too much infrastructure.
Drone network down..alert..alert.. (Score:2)
Imagine the chaos if the skies are full of these delivery drones - carrying shit everywhere - and for some reason they start dropping like flies. The random stuff dropping from the skies pelleting, in addition to the drones themselves.. surely this scene would fit into a sci-fi 'sharknado'-bad low-budget film as a surprisingly amusing scene.
I want to see it happen either way.
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Haha no remotely modern drone could run without electronics. But, to set off an EMP of meaningful size, you'd need to detonate a nuke in the upper atmosphere, there's no other way if you want the device to have a better effective range than a keychain flashlight.
The best reason to ban drone delivery... (Score:4, Funny)
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Who buys a sack of shit off the internet? Wait, don't answer that.
Problem to be solved (Score:2)
People plinking a drone when it flies over their yard (or any public field) and getting a free Xbox or whatever it was carrying.
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It's like skeet shooting pinatas! This is so going to be so much better than clay pigeons!
drones away (Score:2)
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If a UAV of even 5 pounds drops from as little as 10 feet above your head, it can easily kill you.
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If a UAV of even 5 pounds drops from as little as 10 feet above your head, it can easily kill you.
Five pounds of bitcoins?
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Ever heard of parachutes? (Score:2)
For 3-5% of gross vehicle weight, each drone can have a safety parachute which activates automatically in the event of any stability failure or rapid drop in altitude. Failsafe systems can be engineered to protect the life of anyone who might be on the ground to several nines reliability. A decent drone recovery reward will get the equipment back - either for re-use or for evaluation of failure mechanism - and onboard camera(s) and real-time flight recording will ensure that sabotage is prosecuted ($100k a
It's a proxy for needing to revamp the post system (Score:4, Interesting)
The drone delivery thing seems like a proxy for the fact that the regular postal system desperately needs a revamp to include more standardization. Basically, we need some system which acknowledges that parcel and package delivery is an increasingly important part of the process, and we want to receive things unattended.
You can only sometimes get this now.
If we had a system where we standardized mailbox sizes to some specification, and then licensed out some NFC/smart card system to let postal workers/delivery companies open them, then we might be getting somewhere. Sure, it's not perfect and it wouldn't be everywhere at once, but if you could simply buy the relevant thing at Home Depot and then delivery companies could be expected to use it, it'd be progress. Then the free-market innovates from there: various multi-tiered security products or the like.
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Correct. Using delivery services in Canada, in my experience, were much more of a hassle and much more costly than they are in China. There is no chance drone delivery would be considered in China considering:
I can order something from jd.com this morning and it arrives this afternoon COD.
I can ship documents from the middle of China to Hong Kong within a business day or two for, in USD, a few dollars.
I can ensure everything I arrives promptly and get automatic updates when items I'm shipping are either pic
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If we had a system where we standardized mailbox sizes to some specification
Done, been that way all my life (I'm almost 40).
and then licensed out some NFC/smart card system to let postal workers/delivery companies open them, then we might be getting somewhere
You mean some sort of key ... Again, done, group boxes have had keys all my life.
but if you could simply buy the relevant thing at Home Depot
Home Depot sales mailboxes, all of which meet all sorts of standard requirements for US Postal Service deliveries.
You do realize that everything you've said has been around for, what, a century?
There are even standards for positioning of the mailbox, not just size.
I'm guessing you're not real observant and haven't noticed that all mailboxes are already the same size, basic shape
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And you have missed all the subtlety of the problem. For one thing, there's no way anyone's fitting an iPad package into a mailbox, or even through a mailslot.
There's no way to distribute or update keys rapidly enough to make them general use for delivery companies and the post.
Which is the entire point: the century of mail was for mail with packages considered the exception. Special case enough to warrant needing to be physically present to receive them, or simply gambling nobody steals them when left on t
People (Score:3)
What other issues do Amazon, DHL, Google, and other need to solve?
People. Bored, often too intelligent for their own good, people.
How long before trolls figure out they can drive their cars close enough and in such a manner that self driving cars execute lane changes to avoid accidents and pull off the freeway? Or until someone realizes they can jam the car's sensors and the poor passenger, with no access to a steering wheel, can't convince the car to pull out of the open parking spot it's convinced it's barricaded in?
How long before an Amazon delivery drone comes in to a house that's observed to regularly get deliveries and gets a blanket tossed over it before being purloined by nerds who just got a sweet free drone to try hacking?
Wind gusts happen. You can factor in for a typical wind gust, a severe wind gust, a once in a century wind gust. You can factor in for different types of hardware failure, for power loss, etc. You can factor in for trees, for tall buildings, for cables... They're finite problem sets.
But bored people? They're infinite.
Too Late (Score:2)
[R]researchers? (Score:2)
Do it right, at least.
We'll have package delivering drones when (Score:2)
we all go to work, school, and shopping using our helicopter backpacks.
Jeeze, people ... (Score:2)
... for those idiots advocating shooting drones, check your local ordinances. It's illegal to discharge a weapon within city limits, subject to certain exceptions from which a drone is exempt.
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I doubt anyone living in a place like Manhattan would even notice, with all of the noise already present - especially from street traffic.
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But there would be less traffic if there were fewer delivery vehicles on the road. Especially those noisy diesel vans.
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The main problem with traffic is not delivery vehicles, but single-person private cars. For them, more efficient transport options (car sharing, public transport, bikes) exist. For delivery, the truck is often the most efficient solution already.
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The main problem with traffic is not delivery vehicles, but single-person private cars..
But if deliveries are faster and cheaper there will be fewer single-person private cars on the road. Many car trips are to fetch a few items from the grocery or hardware store, or to fetch some documents that you left at work. If on-demand drone delivery was available, these trips could be avoided.
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The number of UAVs it would take to replace a single FedEx or UPS truck would certainly be several orders of magnitude noisier.
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"But there would be less traffic if there were fewer delivery vehicles on the road. Especially those noisy diesel vans."
I was in Amsterdam last week and the ugly brown UPS trucks were electric, I was almost run over by one because I couldn't hear it coming.
It's just a regulation thingie, if they get forced to make no noise inside city limits, they don't.
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This a thousand times. Watching the videos, I can't shake the feeling about how inefficient these things are and how much more efficient a delivery truck is. Sparsely populated countryside is really the only place where delivery drones make any sense at all.
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And how exactly is a drone supposed to make a delivery to my apartment on the 56th floor in the middle of Manhattan?
It could deliver to the roof. Then you could go up and get it, or a robot could bring it to your apartment.
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I wasn't defending the practical aspect of the technology, just the noise non-issue.
But to answer your question, if you live in a 56-floor building you have a doorman. The same guy who takes deliveries of bulk items all day for 1000s of residents could handle the miniature drone deliveries as well.
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The problem where people have to be paid to deliver items. Like your postman, or courier drivers. Especially those pesky bicycle couriers in cities.
Re:What problem does this solve, again? (Score:5, Insightful)
Weird this got modded 'Interesting'.
Sure, we pay people to have those goods delivered to our door; it's called a service and the people providing it need to feed their families too. That said, if you eliminate those costs by 'automating delivery by way of drones', you'll add the price for buying/training/maintaining these and the whole infrastructure that comes with it; hence, you eliminate known costs by adding new guesstimated (bigger?) costs. TCO is mostly a buzzword in my vocabulary, but in this case it probably is worth having a look at. On top of that you'll probably need to keep a backup 'manual service' at hand anyway because these things won't be able to do their job when it rains/snows/storms/... heck, a bit of wind and you're finished. Nobody cares if the postman wears shorts or a scarf, we 'know' he'll come through.
Also, you may consider bicycle couriers a nuisance, having these things whizz around everywhere sounds (!) much more annoying to me. Might look 'cool' in Sci-Fi movies, it would get on my nerves quite fast in reality I think.
The part I'm I think will be the big show-stopper is the likelihood of people 'catching goodies from the sky'. Given the technical restrictions of these drones it seems fair to assume they'll be used mostly for 'small but expensive' goods. What's to stop people from building a microwave-gun to fry the electronics and run of with the cargo ? Heck, a decent slingshot could probably bring them down. I realize one could rob any courier service, but with drones it's going to be dead-simple unless they start building in all kinds of security measures but thus limiting the capacity/range/... of the machine.
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But man the loss of jobs...
People are insanely expensive (Score:2)
Jobs machines do are incredibly cheaper than humans doing those same jobs in nearly all cases. Humans are insanely expensive, even mostly untrained ones. A $10,000 drone, especially one purchased quantities in the tens or hundreds of thousands, seems like expensive kit for just doing deliveries. But you could throw it away every 4 months instead of maintaining it and it would still be cheaper than hiring a human.
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People are expensive because money is "stored people". It's basically a store of labor.
People pay money to let someone else do the labor when they can't or don't want to.
Your new iphone if followed down enough steps is almost 100% labor. The raw materials cost
money because of the labor required to create them. We have things like robots, machines,
animals, etc.. that reduce the amount of human labor at one step but all those still require
human labor to maintain them.
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Just gonna leave this [wikipedia.org] here.
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Drones make sense for very rural areas. Instead of sending a van out to a remote farm or town a drone could be sent. It would need some infrastructure and the drones would be fairly large, fixed wing aircraft (maybe 3-4m wing span) with VTOL, but it could work. They could fly fairly high, out of range of microwave guns and most rifles, and then do a vertical landing at the (attended) target area.
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Very much so. And it is basically not solvable in an efficient way anyways. This "drone delivery" is a pure PR stunt that will not materialize in this decade or the next one.
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Driverless cars and drone deliveries are good examples of the old saying, "just because you CAN do something doesn't mean you SHOULD."
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Driverless cars and drone deliveries are good examples of the old saying, "just because you CAN do something doesn't mean you SHOULD."
Or they could use the driverless cars to do the deliveries.
Is this some kind of secret code? (Score:2)
I keep getting a naggy feeling that these anonymous posts with over-the-top claims are some kind of coded communication.
Think about it - in today's times when all communication is tapped, saved, processed and filtered by supercomputers, what better way to convey coded information or pass instructions than to post in the open, on public boards, buried in posts adopting the same manner and tone as thousands of other crack-pot posts?
And if the secret is in danger of being let loose, to immediately flood the fo
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Crank posts in internet forums are the modern day equivalent of the numbers stations on short wave radio.
Thank goodness we have the NSA scooping all this stuff up and looking for patterns!
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Obama runs a baby-Stalin dictatorial regime.
Does the baby Stalin sport a magnificent mustache? If not, I demand a refund!
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You've got your political speechifying down pat!
In classic political style speech, you repeat "Obama" over and over when a single mention of his name and one sentence would have been adequate to state all your "Obama" points. Listen to any preacher, politician, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Jesse Jackson (who likes to throw in a lot of rhymes bcause it makes it easy to remember) or other professional blow-hard- this is exactly how they speak publicly. I believe it is based on the principle that if you repeat
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Target practice.
Do you shoot at cars that go by your house too? How about planes that fly over? What happens when it falls and hits someone from 5-600 feet up carrying a 50 pound payload you going to pay the hospital bills after you shoot it out of the air?
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Target practice.
Do you shoot at cars that go by your house too? How about planes that fly over? What happens when it falls and hits someone from 5-600 feet up carrying a 50 pound payload you going to pay the hospital bills after you shoot it out of the air?
if a somebody's drone was trespassing on my property I would blast it out of the sky.
Actually you don't own the airspace over your property.
"The United States Government has exclusive sovereignty of airspace of the United States. The act defines navigable airspace as "airspace above the minimum altitudes of flightincluding airspace needed to ensure the safety in the takeoff and landing of aircraft."
-wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_rights)
In fact the United States Supreme Court in UNITED STATES v. CAUSBY ruled that air space is a public highway, as such you would be shooting a ve
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Actually you don't own the airspace over your property.
"The United States Government has exclusive sovereignty of airspace of the United States. The act defines navigable airspace as "airspace above the minimum altitudes of flightincluding airspace needed to ensure the safety in the takeoff and landing of aircraft."
ok then I claim the first 100 feet or so above my property. basically anything within range of my shotgun. I'm sure this won't be a problem, FTA doesn't even want to talk about drones much less regulate them as aircraft. if a UPS van drove across your property while delivering packages to other people's houses, you'd shoot it too.
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Might trigger a whole new arms-race where Amazon will add surveillance/guardian drones etc ... before you know it the sky will be full with things whizzing up and down, firing blue and red lasers at each other =)
Somehow makes me think of https://www.goodreads.com/book... [goodreads.com]
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Couldn't the drones include cameras? Very good cameras fit in smartphones, so this isn't a size or weight problem.
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I hate to say it, but in general you don't own the airspace above your house...
There are exceptions, and "air rights" do exist.
But rest assured, helicopters fly over houses at 500 feet above the ground all the time and they aren't trespassing.
--- commercial helicopter pilot and certified flight instructor for over 10 years
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No crime to use a laser pointer on your own property.
Now, lets aim those at commercial aircraft...
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it's not against the law to fire water out of a hose at an aircraft.
Although, I'd prefer to take a lesson from history and start deploying barrage balloons. The hazard isn't so much the balloon itself, but the tether. Particularly for a small UAV.
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it's not against the law to fire water out of a hose at an aircraft.
There is no specific law against it, just like there is no law specifically against throwing bowling balls at passing bicyclists. But there are general laws against endangering or harming other people, or intentionally destroying other people's property.
Clay pigeon (Score:2)
If the drone is flying in my backyard without permission, isn't it trespassing on my premises? Am I therefore not allowed to defend the sanctity and privacy of my home by shooting it out of the sky with extreme prejudice? For all I know, it could be carryin
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it's not trespass if it's not causing a nuisance. The second it causes a nuisance, it is trespassing. The law is pretty clear on that. The exception is emergency vehicles and military aircraft. Of course a Harrier jump jet hovering five feet over your daughter's swing set is going to cause a nuisance, but if your home is situated a dozen yards from the end of RAF Bollockstown don't be surprised if you get regular traffic doing low passes fifty feet over your house during normal approach manoeuvres.
$10k city/state fines? Pshaw! (Score:2)
Try $100,000 and 20 years in federal PMITA prison.
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Perhaps you should read what you referenced. High cost and low capacity killed it. It may not be viable for non-paper items as thay may be damaged. Also the tubes were only 7-8 inches in diameter. Letters bend while parcels don't.
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To be fair, it seems that most of the high cost came from the government paying rent to private property owners. I don't think that would be an issue today.
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They are _a_ bottleneck.
lithium-ion batteries are quite adequate for 10 or 20 minute flights in a small drone.
3 minutes flight at 60km/h takes you 3km.
Taking for example - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] - this needs around 60 drone stations to cover the entirety of London.
Each drone can do 10 deliveries an hour - 180 a day, 65000/year.
The network can do 4 million deliveries per year.
The cost per drone is perhaps pessimistically, 1000 pounds.
They need to survive a week or so to easily recoup their losses.