As an Amazon Prime member, I sometimes use Prime Now to get deliveries made in two hours from a limited selection of products, and that requires a minimum order and a delivery surcharge. It's still a great option that I take advantage of. I have to imagine I would also take advantage of an even faster drone delivery option for some things: snacks when I haven't gone shopping and have people coming over (and I can't be bothered to go out to do proper shopping beforehand), the odd household item I need but don't feel like driving to pick up, etc.
The "not driving" part is the key for me personally. I don't really like risking life and limb to buy potato chips.
The logistics of even getting close enough to the ground to not obliterate your package, in an open enough area, while avoiding people and other obstacles (both stationary and moving) is a nonstarter for even small cities imo. Good luck in NYC.
I think when you guys say "cities," you're talking about some kind of nonexistent arcology of mile-high cyberpunk buildings where each tenant lives in 50 square feet. I live in a city, mere minutes from downtown, in a town home that is neither big nor fancy nor isolated. There is ample space to fly right up to my door step without ever coming close to any person or vehicle that could conceivably be close to my front door unless someone were standing in front of my front door, and even then, I'd probably lay out my special RFID-enabled chartreuse drone delivery area designation mat on my back deck instead or whatever. It's not a hard problem. All the hard parts have been solved. It's mostly legal now.
Also, I'd bet that what you consider a safe range for drone operation and what a federal aviation safety official (or non-US equivalent) considers safe are two totally different animals.
I can walk down to my sidewalk and have a half-ton vehicle going 45 mph drive within 20 feet of me in a moment. There is no question in my mind that that circumstance is much more dangerous than any delivery drone you care to send coming within half that distance. We live with some very generous tolerances for risk.
But to speak to the Blu-Ray player being hurt by the drop, sure, but what makes you think every possible item to be delivered would need to be accounted for in modeling a service like this? I assume there's a narrow band of items that make good candidates, and I'm not interested in hypothetical problems with delivering items that aren't good candidates in the first place.
>> There is ample space to fly right up to my door step without ever coming close to any person or vehicle
You used your threshold for safety as the basis of your argument.
> what makes you think every possible item to be delivered would need to be accounted for in modeling a service like this?
I think this because I highly doubt Amazon wants to make the move to drone delivery in order to move potato chips, or single video games, or movies which cost at most 70 bucks. The aim to automate delivery as a whole through drones, not automating special cases. We're not talking about a set of weights here. I gave the example of a single blu-ray player, which is a reasonable item for delivery.
Even if you want to stay with your special case, dropping items from 20ft in the air, or lowering a drone with spinning propellers to street level, in a city is a issue. Companies don't like potential liability.
Still, even going 20 or 35 mph is enough to kill someone, and 20 feet is not a lot of room, especially with no barrier between the sidewalk and the car. Last weekend, a driver swerved to hit a car that was stopped in the street and struck the tree on the corner of my lot. Luckily, no one was hurt, but the key word is "luckily." Anyone who'd been on the sidewalk would've been paste.
Compare that to the rather less immediate concern of a drone that might fall out of the sky, a drone that might clip me.
At the end of the day it's a lot easier for theieves to just follow the UPS truck.
I am still waiting for Prime Now in Vancouver!
I think targets are going to be inevitable. There's no way that a drone is going to be able to deliver to my front porch. It would be much easier to delivery to my deck in back.
The "not driving" part is the key for me personally. I don't really like risking life and limb to buy potato chips.
By chance, do you have vertigo?
But yeah, a drone could get to my front door. I agree with you, though, that having some way to designate the delivery area might be necessary.
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Want to get more advanced and efficient? When your package is delivered, Amazon sends you an access key to the dock. You can now go to the rooftop, type in your access key, and get access to the room to get your package. After it's claimed, your access key expires. This means only people with packages inside the dock have access. Yes, technically if you get a package delivered, you could access the room, and steal a package from someone else. However, there would likely be a camera in the room, and there's a record of you having access, so I can't see it being an issue. You could offset the risk even more by having 10 compartments in the docking area, so there's a 10x less chance of someone else having access to the same compartment. Right now I walk through my modern condo and see packages sitting in front of doors, in hallways without cameras, and there isn't a problem.
There might be 1,000 people living in a high rise, or thousands working in one. It would be easy to get tens of thousands of people access to air deliveries at home and work with a dozen docks. It's also a great selling point for offices and condos. "Our building allows you to receive air deliveries."
For example, look at the below image of high rise condos in Chicago. They're all filled with heavy equipment. They're not filled with the super rich having extravagant cocktail parties.
You could have a kind of platform coming out of your front window (not necessarily for it to land, but to receive the package). Now imagine it would be fully automated, as the drone approach, the platform comes out or open, receives the items, comes back in. The mailbox of the future. We call it the iPost, and we think you're gonna love it
How does the drone identify apartment 5b from 4c?
Most balconies like that in my area (Omaha) have another balcony on the next floor up in roughly the same size and shape. How reliable are the flight algorithms when dealing with cielings? How does that affect airflow?
What happens when a drone gets the wrong balcony?
What happens when a drone delivery is canceled because of patio furniture, potted plants, incorrect patio dimension from the local record keepers or whatever other problem with a private landing platform?
None of these are insurmountable, they just haven't been surmounted yet.
Doesn't help with complex patio furniture though, and ceilings are a genuinely hard problem. (Most apartments in Seattle are like that too.)
It could have tiny legs and the actual target area could be a foot above the ground and it could be a net (so the wind the drone makes blows through harmlessly). Then it can catch a package dropped from a few feet.
Amazon, you have my written permission to use this idea and sell me this product.
Go out on the balcony with a phone app that prompts you to take pictures of the view in all directions. It sends these along with GPS coordinates to Amazon.
Drone flies to GPS coordinates and then descends until it's views 'match' those in the pictures you took.
I can already order groceries online and pick them up myself for a small fee, here in Austria. Using drones would just take it farther and quicker, and I would have a lot more choices available. USB-C adapter I need for my new MacBook RIGHT NOW? Check. That new book? Check. Exotic batteries for my audio equipment? Yep.
My building's roof is at least as secure as its lobby.
I think the point when this becomes in any way practical is really really far off. Interesting demo for sure but pretty sure I'll never have something delivered this way in my lifetime.
Basic human decency, reciprocal honesty, a $60 Wifi surveillance camera.
Who knows really? Don't mind me, just going to take my AA gun back home.
(Plus, let's also factor in the fact firing weapons inside a city is illegal. But don't mind me)
So i don't think a drone , in this high density case could offer much savings.
It makes no sense in dense urban environments in the same sense that storage lockers don't make sense in the burbs.
What new product ever had an addressable market of 6 billion people on launch? Do people not realize that you can still have a successful product even if your market is limited to 100 million customers?
having said all that this idea of drones flying around all over the place semiautonomously is crazy to me. maybe i'm getting old.