Why Two Amazon Drones Crashed at a Test Facility in December (msn.com) 32
While Amazon won FAA approval to fly beyond an operators' visual line of sight, "the program remains a work in progress," reports Bloomberg:
A pair of Amazon.com Inc. package delivery drones were flying through a light rain in mid-December when, within minutes of one another, they both committed robot suicide... [S]ome 217 feet (66 meters) in the air [at a drone testing facility], the aircraft cut power to its six propellers, fell to the ground and was destroyed. Four minutes later and 183 feet over the taxiway, a second Prime Air drone did the same thing.
Not long after the incidents, Amazon paused its experimental drone flights to tweak the aircraft software but said the crashes weren't the "primary reason" for halting the program. Now, five months after the twin crashes, a more detailed explanation of what happened is starting to emerge. Faulty readings from lidar sensors made the drones think they had landed, prompting the software to shut down the propellers, according to National Transportation Safety Board documents reviewed by Bloomberg. The sensors failed after a software update made them more susceptible to being confused by rain, the NTSB said.
Amazon also removed a backup sensor present that had been present on earlier iterations, according to the article — though an Amazon spokesperson said the company had found ways to replicate the removed sensors.
But Bloomberg notes Amazon's drone efforts has faced "technical challenges and crashes, including one in 2021 that set a field ablaze at the company's testing facility in Pendleton, Oregon." Deliveries are currently limited to College Station, Texas, and greater Phoenix, with plans to expand to Kansas City, Missouri, the Dallas area and San Antonio, as well as the UK and Italy. Starting with a craft that looked like a hobbyist drone — and was vulnerable to even modest gusts of wind — Amazon went through dozens of designs to toughen the vehicle and ultimately make it capable of carting about 5 pounds, giving it the capability to transport items typically ordered from its warehouses. Engineers settled on a six-propeller design that takes off vertically before cruising like a plane. The first model to make regular customer deliveries, the MK27, was succeeded last year by the MK30, which flies at about 67 miles an hour and can deliver packages up to 7.5 miles from its launch point. The craft takes off, flies and lands autonomously.
Not long after the incidents, Amazon paused its experimental drone flights to tweak the aircraft software but said the crashes weren't the "primary reason" for halting the program. Now, five months after the twin crashes, a more detailed explanation of what happened is starting to emerge. Faulty readings from lidar sensors made the drones think they had landed, prompting the software to shut down the propellers, according to National Transportation Safety Board documents reviewed by Bloomberg. The sensors failed after a software update made them more susceptible to being confused by rain, the NTSB said.
Amazon also removed a backup sensor present that had been present on earlier iterations, according to the article — though an Amazon spokesperson said the company had found ways to replicate the removed sensors.
But Bloomberg notes Amazon's drone efforts has faced "technical challenges and crashes, including one in 2021 that set a field ablaze at the company's testing facility in Pendleton, Oregon." Deliveries are currently limited to College Station, Texas, and greater Phoenix, with plans to expand to Kansas City, Missouri, the Dallas area and San Antonio, as well as the UK and Italy. Starting with a craft that looked like a hobbyist drone — and was vulnerable to even modest gusts of wind — Amazon went through dozens of designs to toughen the vehicle and ultimately make it capable of carting about 5 pounds, giving it the capability to transport items typically ordered from its warehouses. Engineers settled on a six-propeller design that takes off vertically before cruising like a plane. The first model to make regular customer deliveries, the MK27, was succeeded last year by the MK30, which flies at about 67 miles an hour and can deliver packages up to 7.5 miles from its launch point. The craft takes off, flies and lands autonomously.
Words "crash" and "test" are highly correlated (Score:2)
Why Two Amazon Drones Crashed at a Test Facility in a December
The words "crash" and "test" are highly correlated. So are the concepts of crash and aircraft and bad weather. No surprise at this headline.
Faulty readings from lidar sensors made the drones think they had landed, prompting the software to shut down the propellers
Interesting, but hardly surprising. LIDAR is known to have faulty detection in rain.
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Which is why it's funny to see people insisting that LIDAR-based Robotaxis are right around the corner ;)
LIDAR is a great crutch for getting you 95% of the way to automation, but it just abandons you for that critical last 5%. You always have to solve vision. LIDAR can be an aid, of course - but since it works in the same spectrum as vision, it's arguably more ideal to use e.g. high-res radar where you're seeing the world in a different spectrum than your vision, so the strengths and weaknesses of each ca
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** Can compliment
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The words "crash" and "test" are highly correlated.
Quite so. It also seems worth noting that both those words together are frequently associated with the word "dummy"...
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Normalizing crash and test is a terrible idea. That's as bad as SpaceX normalizing that rockets exploding is just a part of testing. No. We are not in the early days of aviation or rocketry, so things should not be crashing during tests (much
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Even the first UAV's closer to what you think of as drones (VTOLs) have been around for a fair amount of time, since the
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The first "drones" (unmanned aerial vehicles) were built before WWII.
And they bear little resemblance to modern drones other than being unmanned. Any automated guidance would be following a radio signal, VOR or otherwise. During WW2 they tended to be radio or wired guided by a human observer, aboard the mothership aircraft. I think the Germans had some success in the Mediterranean against ships.
Heck we could even be nice and say the first drones were built in the 1950's if I remember my history proper. Our neighbor's great uncle would sometimes fly it out of their back yard when he came to visit. He bought it in the 1950s... 1956? He did not have the original controls, they were replaced by 80's equivalents.
Post war radio controlled aircraft. Entirely manual control via radio and within visual observation. Still cool today IMO. Takes some real skill to operate. Different world than drone
Seems legit (Score:5, Funny)
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Or in this case, the crash rate goes up because Amazon are trying to make them as cheap as possible by removing any redundancy. Gotta make them cheaper than a delivery van.
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Or in this case, the crash rate goes up because Amazon are trying to make them as cheap as possible by removing any redundancy.
They probably bought the unbranded ones from Amazon.
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They probably bought the unbranded ones from Amazon.
Well played sir!
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Really primitive drones wouldn't have had this kind of failure, because they would have used a more limited but also more reliable ultrasonic sensor. It uses 1970s technology (except with a 1990s technology IC onboard) which has been more or less perfected.
Of course, if they had just had a backup sensor to cross-check with their LIDAR, this still wouldn't have happened, so this is just because they were being cheap. The most rational backup would have been... actually another LIDAR sensor, but a far more li
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Or momentary switches on the landing legs.
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You're not necessarily wrong, but more moving parts come with their own special kinds of problems.
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You're not necessarily wrong, but more moving parts come with their own special kinds of problems.
Point taken regarding moving parts. But having two or three switches per landing point contact, and taking a vote, probably addresses that problem adequately. And you could use magnets along with reed switches or Hall effect senors, mitigating some of the concern associated with traditional switches.
And if you combine ultrasonics - your original suggestion - with the switches proposed by ObliviousGnat, you have two layers of redundancy on top of the LIDAR. And one of those layers has its own redundancy.
So a
Oh my god! (Score:2)
Is the December OK? Can anyone check up on it?
FORM LETTER TO AMAZON (Score:1)
Your name
Your address
The date
Amazon
Address
Re: UAVs in my airspace are disallowed
Dear Amazon,
I am (your name here) and I reside at (your address here). The airspace from ground level to 400 feet above ground level at this property is under my control as per FAA regulations. Your "drones" travel at up to almost 70MPH and carry themselves (80 pounts for the MK27-2) and up to 5 pounds of cargo. From even only 100ft high, the instantaneous force of a crash exceeds 42,500 lbf. As your "drones" have shown a pr
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So what? If a few hundred thousand people sent those letters, Amazon would drown in legal fees.
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Your name
Your address
The date
Amazon
Address
Re: UAVs in my airspace are allowed
Dear Amazon, I am (your name here) and I reside at (your address here). The airspace from ground level to 400 feet above ground level at this property is under my control as per FAA regulations and I would like to allow you to use my airspace to perform anti-gavron operations as you see fit to ensure that your deluxe drone delivery service remains available so that I and other fun loving futurists can e
Sounds like a bad idea (Score:2)
Removing redundant systems until you can still pass the tests doesn't make for a reliable aircraft.
These things are going to be flying over people. They need to not just fall from the sky when a single sensor fails.
Imagine "The crash was caused by the heater failing in the pitot tube, causing it to ice over and report a 0 speed. The aircraft shut off both its engines and returned all control surfaces to a neutral position because it thought it had landed."
If you had an altimeter (Score:2)
And a GPS with a map you'd think you could figure out how far off the ground you are
737 Max vibes (Score:2)
So they removed redundant sensors and said, basically, "We'll fix it in post."
I guess the stakes are lower than the 737 Max, dropping out of the sky probably won't result in more than 1 death per incident. Still, I wouldn't want that junk flying over me.
Amazon is giving away free drones (Score:2)
It's true, Amazon is giving away free drones to anyone that can catch one and rip the GPS tracker out of it.
Zipline (Score:2)
Simple fix (Score:2)
A cheap lightweight contact sensor could avoid that issue, but since cheap is more expensive than free, I guess they'll do the old weigh the costs against the cost of wrongful death suits and march on.
Many Decembers to choose from? (Score:1)
Which December though?
Why specifically "A" December?
Proofreading is important.
Theft time! (Score:1)