Drone Delivery
 

Adam Savage goes to a workshop where delivery drones are made and tested.

Adam Savage is kind of a tool, and hard to watch, but his celebrity allows him access to interesting things.

I am really impressed with the owner of this company "Wings". Super smart, feet on the ground.

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Interesting stuff!


I really enjoyed Mythbusters back in the day, and Adam was often the more entertaining of the 2. And he didn't seem "out there" in the show. But I've watched some of his YT content (not much) in the last couple of years, and he seems borderline whacko. I'm not sure if he seems manic or on drugs or ..., but he seems quite a bit different than he did in the show. His content has to be particularly interesting or catch me in just the right mood for me to be able to sit through it.

Well said. He's got a million-plus YT subscribers and because of that I think humility has left the chat when it comes to his persona, but his fame opens many doors to interesting subjects. Fast forward is your friend during the cringe moments,

Boy howdy are we going to need regulations around this. Can you imagine how annoying it would be to have drones buzzing overhead 24/7? Maybe have an ‘intermodal’ service where the flying drone takes it to a depot in the neighborhood, and a road going drone brings it to your door. College campuses already have fleets of bots delivering food.

Damn delivery drones! :D

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This is the exact wrong application of VTOL UAS...open and shrouded rotor UAS are dangerous and inefficient for package delivery. What until Little Scooter gets his hand mangled, and he will, then the lawsuits begin:

Have you been harmed by a drone, left helpless and feel abandoned because a drone touched you? Call us, Bombastic Bushkin at...

I have been involved in three separate "studies" of the issue and we never found the business case, cost or efficiency, for drone delivery. It takes a big VTOL UAS to deliver a 5lb package with a 35 to 40 minute endurance.

The only business case that made sense to us was using larger drones to fly cargo to under used airports, and there are a lot of them, to get packages close without large trucks over the road. Airport to airport is very efficient and predictable.

Great idea, needs a lot of innovation to make work in a safe, sustainable manner.

Amazon is already using delivery drones in College Station, TX and the neighbors are not happy about the noise.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/16/amazons-drone-expansion-plans-spur-pushback-from-texas-residents.html

https://nypost.com/2024/08/19/business/amazons-delivery-drones-make-too-much-noise-residents-say/

I didn't say I think its a good idea. Quite the opposite. The weather angle alone makes the whole thing suspect. I think we need something more along the lines of a JDAM:D.

If that was going on in my neighborhood, there would be lawsuits out the wazoo.

"Drone Delivery" - Sounds like a complicated way of doing something that's always been very simple.

just because you can

I’m genuinely curious. Did you study urban areas?

Think NYC - in particular Manhattan. Confined geo. Apartments with balconies for drop off if resident not there. Rooftops you can mount recharging stations on (like they rent out space for cell repeaters). Warehouse in NJ for fulfillment.

That’s about the only one I can think of.

The density is there to support it, but think of the air currents around tall buildings on a windy day. Also, there is a ton of both foot and car traffic, only a matter of time before a drone comes down in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Wouldn't work out too well where I live either. Right near an airport. Imagine all those pesky aeroplanes mowing down drones trying to deliver Dominos pizza.

That is absolutely part of the issue in urban areas...the safety aspect as well as air vehicle performance parameters and environmental concerns: Wind, rain, snow, etc. NYC in the winter? Good luck.

I absolutely support commercial drones and drone delivery, it just does not pencil out in certain use cases. It generally comes down to a few factors:

- Purchase and maintenance of a new system; the drone and the drone infrastructure, including operator training, is not an insignificant cost. Any delivery system with a payload capacity over 5lbs is going to be a big air vehicle with a significant logistics tail. Training is a large obstacle and expensive.

- Insurance. Think in terms of a VTOL delivery drone hitting a wire and knocking out power or causing structural damage. We can all extrapolate from there...and that is before any personal injury concerns, etc. The legal pot holes facing the drone delivery companies will be difficult to patch over.

- Customer acceptance. There is a large segment that want nothing to do with drone delivery. So, in essence, without wide spread customer support the delivery company has to maintain two delivery methodologies, the old and the new. That has been a significant hurdle.

- Regulatory issues. Visual flight rules, beyond line of sight flight, airspace concerns, hazardous material (batteries)...the list goes on and often for the exact right reasons. Think General Aviation without regulations.

- Availability. When we would bid commercial drone jobs, we treated the job like a flight schedule in the Navy: Flight scheduled, flight flown, cancellation reasons (weather, a/v maintenance, sensor performance, etc.). We found that we flew, after adjusting for our learning curve, around 70% of revenue flights scheduled. The key statistic here is that you still have to delivery the package on time as promised. So, again, the maintenance of the old capability (trucks and vans that, btw, can be rented in high use package delivery times) and the new, now sitting idle, is going to be a barrier.

The above is just the start. Aviation is hard, especially for small drones: We shrunk the aircraft we did not shrink the world. Sounds trite but it is real. Again, I support drone use as much as possible as we overcome some of the issues I listed.

It shouod be a benefit to some types of local delivery. In time, it could dominate food delivery.

There will be crashes just like we have auto wrecks today. Ice and snow will affect a drone just like ice and snow affects road traffic.

It will take time to snag any significant share of local delivery. As time goes on drone capability will improve and increased scale will bring costs down.

Drones and autonomous electric vehicle delivery services.

Exciting and interesting times ahead

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I think drones have their uses but I doubt this is a good one, for most things.

From a physics/economics perspective, it's expensive to deliver anything by air.

This. The only real use for them would be in a case where there is some obstacle to going to point A to B. Like a long detour to get to a bridge or the road is out for normal traffic. In a disaster area, delivering medicines like insulin to areas cut off would be great, but let's all hope that is not a regular thing.

With the limited carrying capacity and the cost, I don't see it as a good business model.

But I would never thought doing short funny videos would be a business, and there are millionaires out there doing just that.