Uber Planning Fleet of Food Delivery Drones 'As Soon As 2021' (engadget.com) 56
At this year's Uber Elevate Summit in May, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi discussed the possibility of a drone-based food delivery service. Now, it looks like a job posting has hinted that the company is looking to launch the service in 2021. Engadget reports: According to the Wall Street Journal, Uber is looking to hire someone with "flight standards and training" experience, who can "enable safe, legal, efficient and scalable flight operations." If the info is legit, It looks like Uber is looking to keep development of the program under wraps as the job posting is no longer listed on its website. According to the Wall Street Journal's report, the drone-based delivery service has been dubbed "UberExpress," and will exist under the umbrella of Uber Eats. The job description reportedly described a desire for an applicant that can "help make delivery drones functional as soon as next year and commercially operational in multiple markets by 2021."
Perfect! (Score:4, Insightful)
Now we can get even fatter with even less effort!
Re: (Score:1)
And if you browse at -1 the creimertard himself will appear in a puff of cooking grease!
Disrupting the drone delivery market (Score:1)
for World Peace!
I hope Uber is still around by 2021.
hunt for food (Score:1)
Among flying things we used to shoot birds for food. Now we will also get drones.
Stop being so damn lazy (Score:1)
Seriously, stop being so damn lazy. As someone who typically walls to one of the neighborhood grocery stores, I'm amazed at how lazy people are. Is it too hard to get your lazy ass in your car and drive to the store? Oh, that's right, it might force you to actually get up and do something rather than be consumed by menial bullshit like social media on your phones. If climate change doesn't kill us off, our own lazy ass behavior will cause us to become way too fucking fat. Stop being so goddammed lazy.
KPA
Spe
Re: Stop being so damn lazy (Score:2)
We work in demanding jobs, typically we are up by 8, an hour of commute, out of the office around 8pm, home by 9. Plus family commitments during the weekend. There's not a lot of time to buy groceries or eat out, Uber eats, GrubHub, etc are typically only $5 more than eating out, and if you time it right, the food arrives at the house less than 10 minutes after you get home, so you can enjoy the most of your 3 hours of free time before you have to go to bed at 11:30 or 12. Those extra 30 minutes a day of fr
Careers at Uber? (Score:4, Insightful)
This isn't looking good for anyone thinking they can drive or ride for Uber in the long term. Clearly Uber wants to replace those pesky humans with robots, for taxi service, food delivery service, and I'm sure other delivery services too.
So much for Uber's claims to provide employment and earning opportunities for a wide range of people.
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The gig economy is anathema to 'long term'. Practically speaking though, Uber won't get much more investment unless they promise new developments that could potentially increase their profitability. Long-term, it's likely they'll have to classify their workers as employees in more parts of the world, so human drivers are going to be LESS profitable over time. Replacing them is basically the only way to increase their efficiency.
Don't worry, the increase in food distribution will mean more jobs in the food s
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This isn't looking good for anyone thinking they can drive or ride for Uber in the long term.
When I rideshare I always chat a bit with the drivers, and ask them how they like the job. Based on these conversations, I can assure you that few of them are planning on a long career with Uber.
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This isn't looking good for anyone thinking they can drive or ride for Uber in the long term.
When I rideshare I always chat a bit with the drivers, and ask them how they like the job. Based on these conversations, I can assure you that few of them are planning on a long career with Uber.
So? Few janitors, burger-flippers and garbage-men planned a long career in their respective fields too. Doesn't mean that most of them are not stuck there with no choice after a few years.
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This isn't looking good for anyone thinking they can drive or ride for Uber in the long term.
When I rideshare I always chat a bit with the drivers, and ask them how they like the job. Based on these conversations, I can assure you that few of them are planning on a long career with Uber.
So? Few janitors, burger-flippers and garbage-men planned a long career in their respective fields too. Doesn't mean that most of them are not stuck there with no choice after a few years.
Garbage men actually make really decent money considering the required skills, you just have to deal with shitty hours, shitty weather, and shitty smells.
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This isn't looking good for anyone thinking they can drive or ride for Uber in the long term.
It's never been good for anyone thinking they can drive for Uber, long term or otherwise. Uber's business model, if we can call it a that, is to treat its workforce as disposable slave labour who wear the cost of doing business whilst being paid less than minimum wage. When they complain or wise up to the abuse, they can be replaced... Erm, I mean reviwed and managed before being replaced by the influx of the next batch of wide-eyed suckers who don't realise that they wont make money.
Uber knows that they
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It's not impossible that the aircraft will be remote controlled by humans, at least at first.
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The next generation wandering around like zombies with their heads fully back, big funnels in their mouths, waiting for their next food drop from the drones.
Won't happen while their heads are tilted down to stare at the phone
Far from safe, legal, or practical (Score:2)
Re: Far from safe, legal, or practical (Score:1)
How did you find that out? That is top secret and known only to our innermost circle (Stalin's disembodied head, Hitler's clone, Hillary and myself).
I'm afraid you've marked yourself as an enemy of the left and one of our euthanasia drones is on its way to you as I type.
the AMA will put a stop to that (Score:2)
the AMA will put a stop to that
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The key question is if drone delivery is safer than putting a minimum-wage-paid teen in a car on public roadways to try to quickly deliver something to you in hopes of a larger tip. I think even Uber would have trouble being on the wrong end of that equation. Ringing a doorbell is no more necessary than using a buggy whip on the drone -- you get an alert on your smartphone app when it arrives. Avoiding obstacles is easy because it flies above them, then lands vertically onto a mat you place on the ground in
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Forget about being placed in the rain, the drone is flying THROUGH the rain with those boxes. Waterproof container? That just adds to the weight the drone has to carry.
So does the water, of course.
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Waterproof container? That just adds to the weight the drone has to carry.
The waterproof container is a polyethylene bag weighing less than a gram.
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Safe places to land are limited (how does it actually 'make the delivery' - it can't ring a doorbell!).
I have seen prototypes. The payload is on a tether. The drone hovers about 12 feet about the drop-point, and then reels out the tether to put the payload on the ground. The tether then detaches from the payload and reels back up.
Navigating an urban area in 3D is hard (avoiding vehicles, overhead cables, etc).
None of that is a problem. The drone takes off vertically, goes up 400 feet (far above almost all obstacles), flys to the destination, and then descends vertically right above the drop point. Any obstacles taller than 400 feet can be mapped as "no go" areas.
Silicon Valley vs laws of physics (Score:5, Funny)
Silicon Valley vs laws of physics, act two.
Can somebody teach that guy secondary school physics?
I have an idea (Score:2)
Plane Drones (Score:2)
Hope the drones aren't fixed-wing, otherwise it'll taste like airplane food.
Sure they are (Score:2)
I'm sure that'll be a smashing success (Score:2)
Just like their self-driving cars.
These guys did a study [springer.com] and even dropped from 5.5 meters reaching a terminal velocity of 10 m/s (22 mph) a DJI Phantom could cause AIS 3+ (severe) neck injury if it fell on someone's head. My buddy has one of those and the biggest scare he had was in mid flight when the controller reported a battery problem. He was at 120m (~400 ft) which is the max unrestricted height, fortunately it was only a loose cable and was able to land safely but... had that been a total power loss
Dangerous. Make drones illegal? (Score:2)
"Drones and people are a really bad mix."
I hope they make drones illegal in our area.
Oh great (Score:2)
If nothing else, it will give Peter Thiel a new way to lament [google.com] the state of technological progress: "We wanted flying cars, instead we got parachute pizzas"
What is it!? (Score:2)
Mobile Ovens (Score:2)
A wheel based mobile pizza oven makes more sense.
Make pizza, insert in oven and it is done by the time the oven makes it to your house.
Don't even need the complexity of pizza making machinery. It can be done in a conventional kitchen before it is sent out.
But it's Uber. (Score:2)
Quietly I don't trust Uber to do this. They have repeatedly made outright wrong or morally questionable decisions that make their customers and vendors less safe.
I don't trust them to build and safely operate flying food-dispensing lawnmowers. No.