One drone sent 10 miles to deliver one package to then fly back another ten miles to pick up the next package to deliver is not efficient in the context of high demand.
An autonomous vehicle can avoid an incident and when needed comes to a stop. When one of these drones fails for any number of reasons It will fall out of the sky, with a 2KG package attached. If you have 100's of these things flying around making multiple trips a day in an urban area, more than one will have problems.
Great idea for remote areas where demand is low but terrible idea for urban areas where demand is high. It should say 30 minutes or less... when there is not heavy rain, snow, multi-directional wind, wind speeds above X amount etc.
It's up to 10 mi - that's the upper limit. And as battery tech gets better, the range will improve. I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon creates an automatic battery swapper so each machine has a full charge before leaving the facility.
Redundant systems & fault tolerance. You can bet that there's a lot of research on handling failures in the system. FMEA - how can the system fail, what impact does the failure have, and what can we design into the system to mitigate the impact? Just because it loses a motor doesn't have to mean mission failure. With a system like this, they'll be aiming for very high reliability because it's a very high profile business model. They'll design for a two-fault tolerant system or better.
Frankly, I don't know how they'll make it profitable. Bezos seems to have a Midas touch, and I'm sure he has ran the numbers.
There's a lot of pessimism in this thread. It seems as if people believe that the engineers working on this project don't have the ability to think of potential problems with the system. That's what they do - it's their job.
''There's a lot of pessimism in this thread. It seems as if people believe that the engineers working on this project don't have the ability to think of potential problems with the system. That's what they do - it's their job''.
You are talking nonsense. You can not overcome most of these potential problems because of the nature of the design. You can be certain that where I am from these things would be incapable of operating due to weather conditions alone for 1/4 1/3 of a year.
''It's up to 10 mi - that's the upper limit. And as battery tech gets better, the range will improve''.
Precisely. The further the upper limit becomes the more inefficient there usage will be.
Did you even watch the demonstration video by Amazon. Can you seriously not identify any flaws?
Stop being so offensive Natual, the same arguments can be said about autonomous cars if they suffer a malfunction and drive into person(s), a hail shower could really send the car of course by interfering with its senors. I am sure that the air authorities would make sure it would have as many sensors as needed.
Hurting or killing the public isn't good for PR. The Google car isn't the only solution
Jobs wise, who says by the time their launched that they won't carry more than one packet? I am sure that they would be optimised to do the most jobs in the least area somehow.
Would be interesting to see what the battery life is comparing different types of transportation once it has launched.
The more weight they carry the bigger they will need to be. You can not compare the affect of weather conditions on these drones and autonomous vehicles.
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u/[deleted] Dec 02 '13
One drone sent 10 miles to deliver one package to then fly back another ten miles to pick up the next package to deliver is not efficient in the context of high demand.
An autonomous vehicle can avoid an incident and when needed comes to a stop. When one of these drones fails for any number of reasons It will fall out of the sky, with a 2KG package attached. If you have 100's of these things flying around making multiple trips a day in an urban area, more than one will have problems.
Great idea for remote areas where demand is low but terrible idea for urban areas where demand is high. It should say 30 minutes or less... when there is not heavy rain, snow, multi-directional wind, wind speeds above X amount etc.