Drone Delivery Was Supposed to be the Future. What Went Wrong?
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- Опубліковано 7 лют 2022
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Writing by Sam Denby
Editing by Alexander Williard
Animation by Josh Sherrington
Sound by Graham Haerther
Thumbnail by Simon Buckmaster
Select footage courtesy Getty and AP; Select imagery courtesy Geolayers; Select music courtesy Epidemic sound
Another rather critical reason zipline was able to do well : they didn't just find an application, they specifically found an application where something similar to drones was being used : small planes. Drones are ideal for situations where the economics of supporting a bush pilot do not work out.
Agree with OP! Well said neeneko! 👍
It also helps that zipline had an actual business plan and a philanthropic outlook rather than the other ones just doing "promotional drops" for college students and tech bros
damn! that's a really good comment!
I'm amazed that none of these so called "big heads" thought about the fact that a drone can be shot down and the package can be taken. Please, please tell me that I'm an |diot and I should just constantly be in awe of what these tech people are doing even though it's obviously dumb... remind me again what happend with Elon's hyperloop and his "revolutionary" system where a bunch of Tesla's drive around tunnels, it's so revolutionary people have been doing it since the invention of the car.
@@BillClinton228 um, delivery guys can be robbed, it's the same issue
Could you imagine the noise pollution with a thousand drones just flying about town all day? Man, it would be an absolute nightmare.
Yeah, hundreds of them flying around every day. Even a small 1kg DJI drone is really loud, a 5-6kg delivery drone would be much worse. Not to mention that if it fails and flys into a car or fall on someone.
I'm with you 110% on the noise. There's something else that occurred to me too: privacy. I've had friends tell me about the unnerving experience of having a drone hovering around their back yard, not knowing who was piloting it. All those delivery drones would be brimming with cameras and other sensors ... I wonder if people would really be comfortable with a company like Amazon flying cameras all around their private spaces? (With Amazon being so well known for ethical practices and a respect for privacy **ahem**) :) Would the drones be forced to fly routes over roads instead? would they be banned from flying over roads at the same time in case one came down in the middle of traffic and caused an accident ... as someone else said here, the really amazing thing is that the executives of these drone-delivery companies thought the idea would ever fly at all. (pun intended)
As if we don't have enough obnoxious noise in our lives!
And driverless cars too
Especially for those who live in cities.
Google were doing all sorts of drone delivery experiments in Australia (project Wing) and they claimed to be the first drone delivery service years ago. But the aviation authority set in place a 10KM restricted radius for these styles of delivery services. That limited them to just delivering Coffee, food, drugs with a hefty extra price attached. Another company achieved a 60km radius of delivery but that was due to the remote location it operated in. In the end the problem is getting past airspace restrictions and working in crowded cities as you point out. The idea is a total dead duck now. RIP drone delivery
Drones weren't a fundamental change in technology, despite what the hype said. Remote control helicopter toys for kids have existed for decades. Drones were just an improvement in efficiency & most importantly in stability (which enabled their use for video / photography).
There will be a niche for drone delivery in rural areas, but that will be all.
Wing was operating 100m from wheee I worked, but they wouldn’t deliver KFC as they needed a fixed spot on the premise with no overhead obstructions. Last I heard, they had done a delivery in Logan and managed to collide with an overhead power line, knocking out the power in a couple of streets. Overhead powerlines, birds, legislation which says you can’t fly drones within 30m of people means drone delivery is never going to work in Australia at least. Not to mention our large BirdLife and who wants to live in a world where the background noise is a thousand buzzing drones.
omg i loved your videos when i was a kid
Lies again? HDB Paris Highest Points
Same thing happened to general aviation!☹️
drone delivery is really great for things like delivering very important things in areas where it's hard to, or quickly delivering supplies to hospitals, but it can't really help the consumer directly like that. it's really great for helping niche situations and that's all it is.
Aside from things like this, i think drones can be used for tasks opposite from original intent - instead of delivering in busy cities, you use them from some logistic hub near a (remotely) big city to deliver to countryside, into smallish communities with prepared landing pads and some type of recharging available. So instead of "thinking" about all the hard things like where to land you have specialized pad that drone "knows of" and some manually prepared routes to get there. This will be much cheaper than waiting for some delivery by car, even, possibly, self-driving one.
Agreed. One of the best uses of drone delivery is in emergencies where a small town has been cutoff from a region due to a major storm and there is a need to deliver medicine to someone in that town. There have been such cases, I remember one where a drone delivered insuline to a diabetic in a remote island that could not be reached any other way.
And of course killing people which was their original intention
@@James-kv6kb as soon as any big tech advances are made they will work their asses off seeing how it can be used to kill people
They've had smashing success delivering grenades in Ukraine.
Ah - I remember being a part of a team (back in 2017) who were building a drone to deliver medicines in the remote hilly regions of Nepal where automobile transportation has not reached yet. We even did a test flight and were successful to deliver (drop) medicine upto a 1 mile range. It was mere a test and the project never took off after the test flight.
Thats a real shame; that's one of the few uses for this that make a ton of sense.
is it because drone don't have enough battery range? should've use RC airplane (like the one Zipline use shown in the video) which can fly to long range .
Wind and turbulence would play a big role in mountainous regions.
Hard to imagine a situation where a person could not walk the 1 mile in a reasonable time, even the areas in Rwanda, etc. featured in the vid.
@@SunriseLAW pretty easy to imagine if they live in the mountains of Nepal and are sick enough to need medicine.
Delivery drones are a little bit like flying cars.
Solving most problems by shooting them up in the air doesn't work, because being airborne adds its own problems.
We already have flying cars, they're called helicopters. The problem is that their mass adoption is not practical from any angle.
And just like flying cars, the drones are practically useless in an every day setting.
And if you want to compare them to helicopters, helicopters are flying cars specifically used for long range transportation through rough environments, an actual useful application just like the video said :)
@@homeofthemad3044 Believe in JESUS today, confess and repent of your sins. No one goes to heaven for doing good but by believing in JESUS who died for our sins. GOD loves you soo much unconditionally.😍😚🤗
Just more Palo Alto tech bro wank pipedreams.
The FAA killed it.
I never thought for one minute drone delivery would ever become a viable, secure, reliable, crime-and-injury avoidant solution.
I thought we were going to have home drone pads (like a 4x4 padded, orange platform in an aerially clear area around the yard or driveway, that would have its own pad address you could enter and transmitter to help the drone find it.) And you could easily have a few community pads on the roof or whatever of apartment buildings, and could fence these off in yards if needed for dogs, etc.
Seems like that would help with the “last mile” problem, but there must be some other problem with that (including that people would need to buy a drone pad.)
what i was thinking
do you have proof of this? @@parslankhalid5041
Looking forward to the sequel when WP talks about the fall of the metaverse
"Metahole"
That is only at the beginning of the hype curve, so it'll be a while. But I'm 100% with you on this one.
hype++
I can't wait for someone to expose all the astroturfing going on with crypto/NFTs
Very ambitious of you to think that it will ever rise to begin with, you can't fall if you never get off the ground
As a drone pilot, I've always found the idea of delivering packages to people's front porch was fraught with serious problems. Most homes don't have a suitable place to deliver to, unless you want it on your lawn, getting hit by your sprinklers. Never mind the battery life and limited payload of drones the size that could fit into neighborhoods.
If you flew them, do you think it was possible, or make sense
@@jakeg3126 I had a Karen chewing me out last week for flying at an open space nearby. How do you think she'd feel about her neighbor getting a drone delivery? Drone delivery is 100% possible for small items. But it won't be profitable or popular. My opinion is it isn't going to happen.
@@markpfeifer1402 ok, I'd love to see a fridge dangling on a wire being flown in the air over a highway.
there is a similar issue for air ambulance helicopters as there are very limited places they can land in due to ground surface area square footage to land, physical obstacles on land like power lines. They are unable to safely fly in cloudy, foggy, or bad weather.
Are you kidding me?? I don’t have one yet, but don’t think I could refrain from slapping her if we were in a public place and I was minding my own business and some Karen came up and started getting in my face over a drone.
I was recently layed off from a very promising drone delivery company focused on medical deliveries. There is a lot of charlatans out there and I feel like everyone thinks they have the one big idea that no nobody thought of.
It's mostly frustrating being around some of the frontrunners in the industry and to be shunned for pointing out realistic challenges and non sexy solutions.
Oh well! The fact is, whoever does create a successful system will be purchased by someone like Amazon once the bugs are worked out.
In Sci-Fi novels or films, its a cool idea. Just like calling someone with your wrist watch but in reality I would rather have a bluetooh earphone to talk on the phone and constantly holding my arm up to talk.
In this case, human delivery is the more practical and cheaper solution than fancy drones.
Another good example is when Elon totally embraced robotic automation during the launch of the Model 3. That gave him 6 months of non-stop headache and in the end, he praises human as "totally underrated" workers.
Elon is a sucker for sensational tech that sounds cool but in reality is not really useful. And he is also sucker for low wages and long working hours for his employees
It seems to me the entire point is this is to avoid having workers at all. Bezos really seems to hate his workers to an unbelievable degree.
Who still uses Bluetooth for phone calls 😂
@@mustang8206 That's what you got out of that comment? I guess we know something about you now.
"To hillbillies, drone delivery would be skeet shooting with prizes." - Bill Burr
Pull!
Also a federal felony, so there’s that. As an FAA UAS certificate-holding drone pilot, I can tell you for a fact it’s a felony to interfere with any drone pilot, even us hobbyists, while we are remote-piloting.
@@Syclone0044 Based on how 'porch pirates' are already a thing, I doubt criminality is going to be much of a deterrent depending on the location.
@@qactustick Heh - why do I now have that mental picture stuck in my head of a glitter bomb exploding in mid-air... That might be a fun sight to watch (provided you're not anywhere close to it... or anywhere in the wind direction, for that matter).
@@Syclone0044
Good for you, Karen! Your certificate and $1 will get a small coffee at MacDonalds. Maybe in the city, you might get the FAA involved. In the country....don’t hold your breath. More states and counties are enacting no-fly drone zones to keep the battery powered peeping Toms at bay. They say that a 3inch goose load of number 4 is most effective.
I still remember when that was announced as the future, and I wondered what would come first: large scale drone theft, or lawsuit from people injured after a package or a faulty drone fell on their heads. Funny to see the problems this "future" was facing were even more mundane.
I mean a plan can fall on your head? Does that mean plane's shouldn't exist? Stop using niche rare cases to make an argument, you are talking about a 0.001% of cases. Also can't people also just rob delivery trucks? What's the difference theft is theft
Not sure what is your point here attacking imaginary positions of what would happen, specially on a video which already stated that the "niche rare cases" are the viable uses of the drones. In any case, though, you might want to consider first the difference between necessary and unecessary, and large scale versus small scale before picking your strawman arguments.
@@dontbe3greedy608 enough lawsuits will destroy any new business venture. So if the amount of people claiming to be assaulted by a drone and suing is high enough, then yeah, that would kill the initiative.
Key word is claim. It's super easy to check if someone actually got hit by a plane or not. It's less easy to see if they got hit by a drone. What's more, even with stuff like cameras or crash detection, it's nearly impossible to determine the extent of the damage done besides what the victim claims.
As far as theft... Same thing about frequency and proof, during a new venture. If the thing is just barely getting traction but everyone keeps reading about all the thefts (or people lying and saying they got their package stolen) is high enough, the new thing will die.
This almost happened to Amazon in 2012. There were a ton of thefts of their packages, as well as damaged packages. So people relied on it less and their sales plummeted.
Buuut Amazon wasn't new at this point. It was already ingrained in a lot of people's lives. So it came back.
A service like drone delivery, even if by Amazon, wouldn't be able to recover unless it already had a foothold in the consumer base. Without that, any big negative press could ruin it
@@noblesseoblige319 I love how you don't address my second point and just go around it. Ok why don't people claim the delivery trucks hit them? Remember you said a claim can bankrupt companies so why are delivery companies thriving? People can steal from delivery trucks so why are delivery truck companies bankrupt. Please stop trying, it's embarrassing. The drone delivery idea is stupid for a lot of reasons but theft and lawsuits aren't even a factor
@@dontbe3greedy608 I literally addressed all your points, and the ones you just now posed were also already answered.
But I'll elaborate even further.
The following is in reference to the points: "why don't people claim they got hit", "why are these places thriving" and "people can steal from trucks, so why aren't delivery companies bankrupt".
The general answer to all of those is basically the same. They are ALREADY ingrained into the lives of their consumers. People will put up with the bad pr because they already are users and have been users for the majority of their lives. That's how deep those services are- most current users have literally never been without the ability to use those products. They are so big that it will take a LOT to make them fall.
Certain new initiatives, however, can live or die by their new media coverage.
This happened with Google glass. Within three weeks of their major test launch, there were over 100 articles from larger companies about the problems that arose. A week later on the one month mark, investment dropped off almost entirely. They kept going for a while, but they never recovered from that initial hit. The then chief of the entire marketing campaign LITERALLY said that it was because of the initial bad coverage, that new people weren't jumping on, and this ultimately led to their downfall.
But if you want, I can address each point with more specific details.
The first, about claiming to get hit: this one is super interesting. See, delivery companies in America use both their own trucks and the federally funded postal service. Since the post office is government owned, it's stupidly difficult to lobby against it in enough numbers to call for any legislation change, let alone bankruptcy (which isn't technically a thing in this case, but you get the point). So while there are accidents like that (higher fatality rates than police), without lots of them AND lots of media coverage, it won't impact them a whole lot.
Media coverage is a running theme here. "vehicle hits someone" isn't as big as a headline as "new company's drone smashes someone's face".
Additionally, again, it's a lot easier to prove a truck injury than a drone one.
As to why these places are thriving, that's an odd one. They are and aren't. Some companies like FedEx are struggling as hell. Others were until they started using the postal service transportation (see the previous point) which had less accidents and thefts (on paper anyways). So while they do take losses when lawsuits are filed against them, they are managing to survive for the most part. Oh and shady employment practices. That helps their costs as well.
And the point about stealing from trucks- here's where the money is. If you're skimming *PLEASE at least read this part.*
They have lots of systems and tech involved to ensure that the package gets to someone's door. At that point, they generally claim to not be liable for what happens. Thefts happen a LOT, but the company can fairly easily prove that they did their job for the most part.
Those same systems aren't in place for drones. So even if the amount of thefts were the same, the company would be more likely to be found liable and eat those costs more frequently, dooming them.
So it's not the same from a monetary standpoint. For the consumer, yes, a theft is a theft. But for the company, they need to get a lot of stuff in place for the thefts to be equal, because currently one is way more expensive than the other.
They could use technology to help, yes, but without the current market to justify the costs, it's just not worth the investment yet.
Lastly... "stop trying"? What is it that I'm trying to do? I never claimed, even once, that lawsuits are the only reason for drone delivery failures. I only claimed that enough early on will destroy a budding business or venture.
That's not an opinion. That's an undeniable fact of business. If you're trying to get started but have to pay millions each month for lawsuits and get bad press from said lawsuits, you're going to have an insanely hard time getting off the ground.
Less money and growing costs means less likely to grow your brand. Theres nothing based in opinion about it.
Early hurdles are always a factor, and anything legal related are concerns as well (which is pointed out in the video even). It's a concern.
Is it the biggest concern? Absolutely not. Not even close. But it's a concern regardless. Not being concerned about it is a recipe for disaster and bad business practice.
00:00 Introduction
00:17 Drone Delivery Hype
01:09 Early Innovations
01:44 Current State
02:14 Amazon's Stance
03:36 DHL's Abandonment
04:12 City Challenges
08:57 Distance Limitations
10:34 Last-mile Delivery
12:48 The Hype Cycle
15:03 Zipline's Success
17:04 Outro
I work for a drone (not delivery) company. In America, and many other countries, there's yet another complication that you didn't touch on: Drones are not legally allowed to fly beyond line-of-site of their human operator. Zipline works in Rwanda and other African countries because the laws are far more lax there, and their US operations are highly situational, but it's currently impossible for large scale far-reaching BVLOS (Beyond Visual Line-Of-Sight) operations within the US, especially ones that require flights over humans like what drone delivery requires.
The regulations governing this can be found in FAR Part 107, but it's a rather dry read so I recommend looking at commercial drone operator study guides to get the gist of things.
It *IS* possible to get waivers to these regulations, but it's not easy, and it's highly situational. Currently, even the big players are only getting location-based waivers for BVLOS flights: "You an fly up to 3 miles in this specific location, with visual observer crew members placed at these predescribed points." And to get such waivers, you have to elaborate on contingencies for every possible failure the system or operation could have and how you plan to deal with it, as well as whatever safety features your drone has on board. A big one they like to see is DAA (Detect And Avoid) systems to prevent collisions with other aircraft.
There absolutely ARE industries where drones can do it better. Zipline is a great example of this. Other industries that use light aircraft and helicopters can also be done with drones for potential pennies on the dollar, big ones are infrastructure inspections, search and rescue, law enforcement/surveillance, and aerial survey/mapping. The tech is actually very close to being ready for much more, but we are still in a legal proof of concept phase, because the FAA has quite the stick up their own rear about safety.
I don't really see a bright future for drone delivery the way amazon and co wanted to do it. It's a tech-forward "solution" to a problem that is hardly a problem at all, and is so full of holes itself that the percentage of the population it could actually be used for is staggeringly low.
"Managers given no direction" sounds like the Amazon I worked for years ago. It's insane to think about how much just my building depended on motivated self starters and it seemed like the whole company survived on it. 30 derps in a department and maybe 5 of them do enough work to carry the others with managers staring at the labor hour cell on their spread sheet, oblivious to anything else going on.
This is why it is more profitable for large corporations to hire lobbyists to pass favorable regulations than it is to hire more engineers. The corporation grows so large that it can't actualy understand the data they have. Just easier to make their smaller startup competition illegal via regulations that the large corporation can afford.
Currently taking a dump in the bathroom of my Amazon and this is bar for bar how it is…still
Pareto distribution
Interestingly your figure of 5 out of 30 matches up with Price's Law.
Price's Law essentially says that as an organisation grows, it becomes increasingly less efficient. 50% of all work is accomplished by roughly the square root of the total number of people. The square root of 30 is roughly 5.5.
If you have 9 people, 3 do 50% of the work.
If you have 100, 10 do 50%.
If you have 1000, 32 do 50%.
@@EnterJustice That's fascinating. I never heard about it before, but I can tell you as long as I've been in the workforce, it certainly is anecdotally true in my experience.
As a skeptic and drone enthusiast, I asked someone with a slightly inside view why Amazon released that one teaser video when the technology wouldn't be there for a long long time (if ever). He hypothesized that Amazon pushed hard on the drone thing to distract the media from some negative press that was floating around at the time. I don't think anyone ever thought this would really happen, just like the metaverse won't happen... it's just a distraction.
Oh wow, that's a new perspective to the whole Facebook saga. That's like an ultimate troll to distract the media
Facebook definitely is pushing into VR/AR stuff and probably is serious about trying to make Metaverse a thing. Time will tell if it's successful, though.
If people end up using AR/VR regularly, there might be demand for "platforms" that integrate everything together in order to, say, allow you to use the same avatar in multiple apps. I think their idea is to ensure that if it does happen, that they'll be one of the primary contenders.
It's hard to predict how people will make use of new technology, though. Just look at how cell phones ended up being used vs how we expected them to be used.
Not sure what the negative press was, but it was released at Thanksgiving time (notice the early December dates on the news clips they show)... the kick off of the holiday shopping season. In 2013 Amazon and Prime weren't quite the default option yet. However, by putting this out, what happened? The start of the Christmas shopping season had coverage in all the news outlets, from local news to the morning shows, talking "Amazon" and convenience... it was free advertising over the whole country for not much cost.
I actually knew someone who was headhunted by Amazon to work on these things; she was drawing a big pay-check as a navigation engineer at TomTom, so they must have enticed her with even more money. They did seem to think it was going to work at the time.
Metaverse is fantasy universe in Zuckerberg head, Just another way to keep people with nothing to do with something todo at the same time pumping ads down your throat. I mean why do i need to see ads on messenger app (whatsapp)?
Just found your channel, I have watched almost 10 videos already, such good subjects and video quality, thanks for your work!
absolutely fabulous video, good job wendover productions
fantastic structure, fantastic narrator, and exctracts a bigger lesson from the topic
Worked at a place that introduced a drone delivery service. It was an absolute flop, panned constantly. The fact of drones is: they can't be out of sight to comply with FAA regulation. In order for the drones to deliver, someone had to plod behind it in a truck, making the entire operation a novel and pointless feat. It's no wonder the op got shut down recently.
Of course laws would need to be changed. Laws also need to get changed for self-driving cars to become a thing.
@@lucaslucas191202 except the laws exist for a reason...
@@dispatch-indirect9206 such as? You're probably one of those people who thought rushed vaccines were a good thing too
Highly doubt it, why invest into millions of dollars of equipment for something that already sells...
Called it
I find it surprising that there was no mention to crime in this analysis. Even in the unlikely event that both the technological and legislative challenges are met, there are way too many areas in the world where drones would simply become easy targets for theft and vandalism. And these are problems you just can't get rid of.
Just have it delivered to a personal lock box locker.
Google's drone has a line that breaks off if you try to yank the drone down with the delivery
@@ogjk but then how do you get the package to the locker? Remember, most of these things are indoors, where drones might have an issue flying
@@xWood4000 it's good. I can only hope they also have countermeasures for flying projectiles too!
Good. Many would hate these things in the air everywhere
Probably not an option for the US suburbs, but works just fine for densely populated areas: delivery pick-up sites. I have 4 sites from different marketplaces within 10 minutes walk from me, and I live on the outskirts of my town.
This is so much more easy and convenient than to door delivery. I don't have to be waiting for delivery at home for hours. Waiting for their calls, confirming that I'm avaiable, listening to their 'sorry, I'm going to be late', etc, etc. I don't have to wait for 5 separate deliveries if I ended up ordering stuff from 5 different shops. I don't have to worry that someone is going to steal my delivery because it was left outside. I just walk 10 minutes and get my stuff.
So in densely populated areas the solution to the last mile delivery problem seems to be: no delivery. Just make the pick up sites available and convenient.
Drone delivery has always been a niche, it makes sense in Uganda for medical and plasma delivery to medical clinics with extremely limited road access. The infrastructure is already there, we've been building roads for thousands of years and you can't beat that.
Rwanda, not `Uganda
Traffic, and the 3rd fucking dimension : *Are we jokes to you ?*
There is somewhat of a market for it and eventually there will be a demand for it but right now its niche. The tech needs to evolve.
Uganda?
@@nicholasleclerc1583 bikes and mopeds can easily weave through cars so it's mostly a non-issue for them
As a person who worked on the drones I can tell you this.
The complexity of it was under estimated. Amazon focuses too much on its cognitive dissonance rather than solving problems.
Underrated comment.
Please explain. You write this idea that they focused on cognitive dissonance without any example or explanation, assuming this is somehow common knowledge. I'd like to know what you're talking about.
Amazon is a business. It wants to make money and have progress.
Aerospace success is based off of methodical and disciplined engineering. Treating a drone program like an app isn't going to enable success.
So the cognitive dissonance is that it wants to be successful but thinks the only way to get there is by doing what it's done before. Day one mindset.
The day one mindset is a great idea. But in aerospace success doesn't come until programs are more mature.
Maturing an aerospace company isn't the same as making a new only digital product for consumers.
@@DaFratRat Cognitive dissonance is a, sometimes stressful, feeling of realizing you believe contradictory information. When someone experiences cognitive dissonance, they often put effort toward changing something about the belief (or the situation), and/or toward avoiding or denying it. Because of cognitive dissonance Amazon didn't think enough about the fundamental limitations of drone delivery.
Is that close to what you mean?
The more i learn about amazon, the more I hate it. Getting you to TRAIN your replacement, who is cheaper labour from another country?
I just tried watching a CNBC video on used cars and couldn't get through more than half of it. There was a feeling of industry capture to it and a feeling of being fed BS that was too strong to ignore. Then I watch this, and it's well-researched, informative, and professionally made. (Yes, some clips are repeated a few times, but it's not even a minor quibble relative to the overall quality.) What an incredible, strange time we've come to when a private YT channel can not just compete with CNBC on quality, but destroy it.
I remeber being on the team ion 2020-2022 . one of the big reasons they couldn't get approval was noise pollution, that and people were concerned over being spied on - we had a big poster in our building that went over the 4 big issues. (Noise, concerns of surveillance, concerns of hurting people or animals, and FAA approval (cause drones are banned like everywhere) They still do the drone tests and manufacturing, but they slowed down and went full send on those silly robots that you see in cali
When I fly my drone, the first thing I have to consider are all the trees and power lines. Three blocks away, I can't fly at all because there is an airport many miles away but it is still an airport zone. The vast majority of the local area is covered by those airport zones. And the rest is trees. Just flying a drone for fun has to be done extremely carefully. Cannot imagine trying to scale this up to for rapid package deliveries. There will be wrecked aircraft all over.
trees are not an issue at 400 ft altitude, where our uav's typically fly. We also sometimes fly inside airport airspace by working for the airport.
you need complex AI but it will happen in the future
Nonsense. Drones fly at few hundred feet. FAA get needs to rule.
@@casIIsac If a problem's only solution is "complex AI" you're going to have a bad time. Autonomous drones aren't as difficult as autonomous cars but still, this would require decision-making only humans are capable of right now.
@@SaHaRaSquad not true at all you can put sensors on the drone that will make the drone avoid obstacles such as trees and buildings
It's pretty hard for delivery drones to compete when a motivated person with a backpack and bicycle would be more effective in most urban environments. The whole "drone delivery" fad was a classic example of trying to create a niche use case for a technology rather than using technology to fill a niche use case.
That's why zipline works. It is urgent delivery over longer distances (points for air) over rough/undeveloped terrain (points for air) to large facilities capable of maintaining a landing area (points for air).
Drone food and small package delivery is the opposite. It is semi-/non-urgent delivery over short to medium distances (points for ground), in developed areas with good ground transport infrastructure for cars or bicycles (points for ground), to private residences with no dedicated landing area (points for ground). All the drone case has going for it is eliminating labour costs through automation, but that doesn't matter if the technology sucks for the job. Things would be different if rooftop landing pads were common or labour costs were super high, but in modern developed countries with good infrastructure it's just not very viable.
The niche use case was last mile delivery.
Absolutely agreed. The tech works but not for massive use.
@@Chris-rg6nm last mile. . .
same day, to people with yards, under unresticted airspace, in fair weather, with small packages light enough for a drone to carry long distances.
they tried to fit tech to a use case and built the niche around the tech.
It's a simple matter of weight ratios. A 5 ounce bird can't carry a 1 pound coconut.
But seriously. A lot of packages that UPS delivers are 50 lbs. You're going to fly them? With drones? It was never a serious idea. A van can hold hundreds of packages. How many weighing how much can you put on a drone?
Then you have to have a human operating each one because the software doesn't exist. The legal liability. I never took it seriously.
But the governments of the world cleared the skies of RC enthusiasts so they could sell the airspace
I think another limiting factor not mentioned is that the demand for rapid, small deliveries in the single-family home suburbs is not at all what it is in urban areas. For urbanites, food deliveries or same-day/next-day essential product deliveries compete (favorably) against what are often 30min to 1 hour trips by walking, public transit or driving through dense traffic (if people even have a car) to get to said take-out restaurants or stores. In the suburbs, those same trips are often just a 5 to 10 minutes drive or a quick stop on the daily commute or while running errands, so despite the longer distances, it's not nearly as much of a chore as it is in the city.
I had talked about using drones when I just started working at big Brown in 2013, ironically before the great drone delivery craze in the news. About drivers using their DIADs to exactly mark a clear drone location during their delivery to an address. Also using package cars as the drone launch and landing location while the driver continued to make deliveries of larger packages. With a recharging drone rack on top, and roof access panel, these could be loaded, scanned and launched. At stops, returning drones could land for recharge or hotswap batteries. Drone would only be needed for short distances, not miles. And you don't need drones for hi density zones since there's many deliveries there vs suburbs and rural - to reduce fuel cost and number of stops available per shift. They finally got on the bandwagon, but think most of my theorycrafting went ignored. ORION (delivery nav software) would need to be completely reworked.
As a pilot I never saw it actually happening. The FAA is too strict with its airspace and all the rules. I also have to constantly cancel flights due to bad weather which would make the drones unable to fly either. The idea of order now get it 1h later was good but the FAA isn't one to play around with.
And as a pilot, I'm sure you're well aware of the fact that the FAA is that strict for a reason. It turns out that managing all that air traffic is difficult and gets dangerous pretty damn fast!
This was always my first thought when this was announced. When drones started coming about, I saw them as a fantastic advancement but not something to just have dashing around in today's airspace. I'm sure it will look far different in the future, but the rise of "hiring someone with a car or bike to make small deliveries" really changed things. Kind of like how self driving cars or small robots are slow to advance, while truckers are the go to for land delivery. It took a while for people to adopt railroads or automobiles over riding horses, too.
As a fellow (?) 107 pilot, I didn't think it would happen......yet. But it will. Amazon and other large companies have their hand in the government pockets, hence RID has passed. It time, a little (LOT) more money will be paid to purchase the FAA in full. You and I will be severely limited as to where we can fly, and amazon, ups, fedex, etc. will have much easier access to the sky.
What’s the minimum elevation for faa? These drones would work better were drafts are not extreme. Say 100ft above elevation tops.
Aye the FAA rules are all written in blood. I see it this way: is getting fast food even faster a major societal issue? In my view it's not. Same with Amazon products; there's no serious problem needing solved that requires such a massive investment and overhaul of the systems.
I remember learning about Zipline years ago pre-pandemic, and I think it's definitely got the right approach. Fast point-to-point drone delivery, rather than last-mile. The problem I foresee is scaling it out so you don't have a sky filled with drones. Each drone would need to carry X number of packages/orders.
They did a video about 3 yrs ago on it. In the early part of this one I was thinking about it and how Zipline had been doing. Question answered.
Well Zipline also was more realistic in the scaling and "sky filled with drones". Their operations actually were conducted in co-operation/under supervision of the local Air Traffic Control. Zipline informed the traffic control of all their flights and I think also the drones had air traffic beacons.
It is much more manageable in point to point and with air traffic control. Same as with bigger planes higher up, air traffic control can create air lanes and establish flying heights and corridors. Zipline, you fly at 200 meters on corridor A, Parcel magic on crossing corridor B stay at 300 to avoid collisions with corridor A. Again possible since airtraffic control could say "all drone delivery operators, register your delivery locations with us. We then assing you corridor in co-operation with you on the best routing. No flying without assigned corridor, drones with beacons on and informing traffic control on drone take off".
The chaos comes when drone want to go all helicopter and land and take off at random positions at random times. Then managing the lanes is much harder. Specially with short drone endurance and nobody wanting to take detours to make for established permanent corridors to which ones drone would have to detour to.
I think it's particularly useful for emergencies for that reason. People always need medicine, but it's not like the demand is so high that the drones would be overcrowded.
Or maybe just put all the packages on a truck? Drones are good for small items needed quickly, if you have huge throughput putting it in the back of a truck works great.
@@earnestbrown6524 Believe in JESUS today, confess and repent of your sins. No one goes to heaven for doing good but by believing in JESUS who died for our sins. GOD loves you soo much unconditionally.😍😚🤗
Great video. I live in Phoenix and let me tell ya, there are not a lot of yards and with the city constantly expanding westward, you hardly see them except when going east toward Scottsdale and paradise valley aka the rich side, or way west towards buckeye which is largely still farmland but quickly industrializing and urbanizing. It used to be peaceful
As soon as you started talking about the restrictions for urban areas my thought was using it for remote areas that don't get daily mail delivery.
Damn, I read about Zipline ages ago. It's cool that they seem to actually manage to scale up because from what I see, they really are doing quite a lot of good for a lot of people.
While destroying a 100 year old hobby that got kids into loving aviation.
Yeah alot of good.
@@krotchlickmeugh627 Destroying how? If anything, I'd imagine the kids and the kids whose parents ' lives had been saved would be very interested in following the foodsteps of those who helped heal them. And saving lives is quite a LOT of good if you ask me.
@@FengLengshun lol. Yeah sure.
Doesnt mattet anyways
@@krotchlickmeugh627 what RC planes?
@@krotchlickmeugh627 LMFAO I'm crying this is so funny. I looked at your channel and you really are upset over drones being used over RC planes.
We are all here praising a company for helping to save lives and give people access to basic healthcare and you're sitting in the comments crying about RC planes being blown out by drones or something. Do you not see how awful a look that is for you?
But please carry on lol.
All of this was immediately obvious to me when all of the news articles first dropped. The real mystery is not why it failed, but how executives ever thought it wouldn't.
That's not as hard to realize as you might think either when you realize that these executives struggle to conceive of a situation where a consumer wouldn't have a clear landing space in unrestricted air space because literally nobody in their world has that problem.
Theft, did you think of that too? OP didnt
@@justsomeuser5123 Thousands of drones flying over the air are just asking for bored teenages to shoot them with airguns.
Because a lot of CEOs believe that the customer has the same vision they do, if you don't ask the customer then you are walking into a costly mistake.
It's ok if they lose money on innovation and Research and development. They have way too much money sitting around doing nothing anyway
This video is a slam dunk, thanks for posting!
I feel like the only way this could possibly work is if we buy and maintain our own package retrieval drones. We can send our drone to a central location where the landing area can be controlled and then we take back control and landing when it gets back. Each drone would need to do less and could be less complex. Since we would know exactly where the start and end points are, we could set a flight path to avoid controlled airspace
Eh. This entire video can be summed up as “it wasn’t profitable enough”
Saw the "Hype Cycle" happen with 3D cinema. When the first IMAX theaters opened in my country, it generated buzz because up to that point, there were no "3D movies." Back then, you only experienced "3D/4D cinema" at theme parks, where you sit in a tiny theater and watch a short film. Now you could watch feature-length 3D movies in a huge theater. Still, IMAX was expensive and the number of theaters was rather low.
The next step happened when regular cinemas started screening 3D movies. These were cheaper than IMAX and were more widely accessible.
The problem is, once the novelty wore off, the experience became noticeably *worse* than regular 2D film. The 3D glasses can give you nausea/headaches. Also, while animated movies could easily be made in a 3D format, a live-action film needs to be FILMED with special 3D equipment. A lot of studios didn't bother, and instead shell out a few million dollars to digitally "convert" 2D footage into 3D. The effect is awful, generating an unconvincing "2.5-D" visual as well as darkening the lighting. Add the tint of 3D glasses and you have a movie that's much harder to *see.*
Tickets for these films cost *double,* and it was definitely NOT worth it. 3D movies disappeared from cinemas here rather quickly.
Ugh that 3D movie fad got annoying fast. I just rolled my eyes at any movie trailer that ended with "in 3D" I prefer a good quality picture & sound with good special effects over 3D.
There's a theory that one of the reasons film companies hyped up the 3D movies was to force the theaters still using actual film to finally switch over to digital to make it cheaper to distribute
@@Barlie_ Studios mostly did it to get the extra revenue from the more expensive 3D tickets.
What surprised me is that the last pre-pandemic numbers I saw indicated that 3D has 10% of the market. Which isn't great, but it's still a lot higher than I expected.
One underreported problem is quality control. Modern 3D demands quality presentation. But most movie theater multiplex chains don't give a crap about quality presentation, so they do things like putting the projector light bulb at 50% brightness in the belief that they're saving a few dollars on bulb replacement. This practice sucks for regular movies, but making everything dark and murky absolutely kills a 3D presentation.
I was sad when many games dropped 3D support though.
6:40 I though these issues could be solved by basically a picnic mat sized QR code to give the drone a clear target landing point.
The main reason I don't think drone delivery at least for now will work is the noise. Even if the drones stick to pre set sky lanes at 500ft the buzzing no stop will be madding
In the US thats not the case it the governments failure to fully fund the faa's next gen gps navigation whitch would alow for easy autonomous drone delivery flying taxis etc.
Well people deal with cars at street level.
Of course no one can say for sure, but I think people will be fine with drones.
cars are WAYYYYY louder than a drone
@@ogjk if they allow a military grade GPS then it is just way too easy for something like Slaughterbot to happen. They shouldn't allow that to happen and just let commercial company to develop a natural looking autonomous navigation AI like birds and bees which doesn't even use GPS.
Exactly what I thought a practical solution would be. It could have been that amazon sent an executive to install a the QR landing mat to whoever subscribes to prime air and he installs the mat at a desired location maybe above the ground and clear off obstacles. And then whenever that customer orders something the package would always be delivered there. The customer would care to ensure the landing pad is clean and clear of obstacles as they do with a dish antenna. No need of fancy and unnecessarily complex AI or laser guidance.
This impacts everyone, not only the customer that places an order. This means big, loud, camera equipped drones constantly flying over neighborhoods. Maybe makes sense in remote areas where it actually solves a customer problem, but I can’t imagine customers are banging down the door for this in any city where they already have options to get things as quickly as same-day. I hope I never see this launch in my city. I do not want drones flying anywhere near my home and I never want my packages delivered by drone.
It's nice feature to logistics, wish good luck to Zip company. Thank you for nice review. 👊
In 2015 I had a college class that we needed to look at an emerging technology and do some research into the challenges facing it. For my group we did autonomous drone delivery. The biggest hurdle we found facing it was FAA regulation, namely that an autonomous drone is required to have a pilot on standby incase of an unexpected signal loss or unknown obstacles. That alone killed the tech in my mind. If the drone needs trained professionals on standby, you lose the savings from automation.
Additionally, the point you brought up of it needing to be perfect is also really accurate too. We figured it would take just one sensor going out, a failed backup, and then the drone crashing on top of someone that would doom the tech. It gets even worse if you try to have it function in a city with high population density since the odds of it landing on a person become massively higher.
This is a cool technology, that's propped up by dreams and hope, with no footing in our current reality. I think it has potential in limited uses, but not how it was pitched.
alot of the issues seem to be more engineering failures rather than fundamental. The 'falling out of the sky' would not be realistic using VTOL fixed winged aircraft (similar to what google currently deploys). While professionals on standby would indeed be expensive, you theoretically only need a handful to cover thousands of active aircraft if the failure rate is reasonably rare... thus recouping those costs with scale.
I really dont see the issue with food delivery as a use-case. Customers value speed quite greatly, the alternative is a dedicated car/bike trip (much more expensive, paying for human labour). Most food items weigh under 2kg, a winch system (as google is doing) gets around all but the worst edge cases in delivery by removing the drone from any contact with the ground and an automatic or human operated battery swapping station would lower capital expenditure buy keeping each vehicle in the air close to 100% of the time.
Gartner hype cycle was a good analogy of the technology as alot of the 'issues' are solvable with good engineering and development time. (Really dont know why they dont use bigger props for horizontal thrust at least to reduce noise)
I wonder if instead of delivery drivers, you could have mobile drone stations. Drivers would park at a location and monitor the drones as they delivered within a given radius.
@@fakename3208 why would you want to involve humans at all lol
@@Redstoner2b2t because as OP just said the FAA requires someone be ready at the controls in case something goes wrong.
But the bigger question might be why would you want to trust the AI completely? Have you seen Terminator?
googles wing already has FAA exemption (flight engineer doesnt have to actively monitor), its not hard. also lmao
I feel they also ignore the impact on wildlife. I fly both FPV and general DJI phantoms etc. For construction surveying in Australia and the amount of times I've had to land because I've disturbed magpies or other birds is pretty crazy. Maybe other countries don't have as territorial species but I'd be worried about damage to both equipment and wildlife with a fully automated set up.
Another interesting thought: The impact OF wildlife. I dont think it is too far fetched that a sufficiently large bird of prey would mistake a mediacl delivery (plane) drone as an afternoon snack or just doesnt like the weird noisy bird in its terretory. Thrained hawks are used to take down drones in restricted airspace so a wild one could pull it off too.
@@unpaidintern6652 In my experience, as a commercial operator, birds and other wildlife are not an issue. The drones we use are up to 25kg, make quite a bit of noise and are quite intimidating to birds. The only concerns we have are the small birds that flock together in murmurs as they tend to fly towards the drone's flight path and then break away last second. Hawks, Eagles and Falcons all keep their distance as well as larger migratory birds such as Geese. We haven't noticed any terrestrial wildlife such as deer or coyotes being bothered or even interesed in the drones as they fly overhead.
In fact, our only real hurdle is that of manned aviation!
Australian wildlife in a nutshell
it's the big raptors and buzzards that are really bad. I've lost two drones, one to an Osprey that dove on it, the other to a buzzard. But they aren't the reason drones didn't catch on for delivery. At least in the US, and it's not even the poor regulations around commercial drone use either. It's two main factors. One the US is huge, I mean really huge and the weather is often quite bad. Quadrotors of the size being proposed don't deal with either bad weather or long distances well. The second is that the US is not terribly well mapped. I do commercial driving for a living and have worked for Fedex. Often the map databases are off by anywhere up to half a mile on the location of a house. When you train a person for a route in a rural area you spend most of the training time showing them which roads aren't on maps, how to get places that are either mapped wrong or GPS'd wrong, or places where there are simply no address numbers at all and you simply have to be shown which addresses match to which locations.
they do not matter
Overhead wires are also a major problem. Most older neighborhoods have a mess of wires above streets and yards. It it would be really hard to safely navigate that tangle, let alone detect thin wires in direct sunlight
Think of the bullets raining down on, oh let’s say, a children’s playground whilst they are outside for recess.
And those pesky wires are EVERYWHERE.
Edit….the same reason we don’t have flying cars yet 😂
So the sweet spot for drone delivery isn't online shopping or food orders, it is for crucial shipments that only drones can perform efficiently. In that sense, this innovation wouldn't be used for convenience, but to save lives in more remote, developing/rural areas.
yes, getting scripts and medicines, light medical equipment and legal docs that require signatures in bumfuck nowhere can be risky and HARD. A drive to the pharmacy is an hour round trip where we live, I think 5 drones controlled by the local usps would change things for the better. Neighbors ride their horses out to the post office, to send packages because our roads just... aren't great nor safe, but we do have wonderful riding trails that are street adjacent. Drones could reduce the risk and need for that sort of required creativity.
@@appalachiabrauchfrau And don't even get me started on how convenient delivering COVID vaccine supplies to rural hospitals would be. If cool temperatures are maintained, drones could save much more lives w/ much less risk of exposure.
Drones are best used in warfare
@@KrolKaz Sounds like something a warmonger would say.
Why not creating ground tunnel or sky tunnel for drone so make sure the tunnel only for drone to keep delivery not even noisy and safe?
For us to make better future should create tunnel for in every house or apartment with special tunnel unit so everyone can enjoy delivery without worry
More privacy should every room have to have special tunnel for drone will be amazing
wonderful video, thanks for focusing on Zipline! that is amazing and I haven't heard of it before
When I first saw this drone concept touted two decades ago. Two Fatal Flaws immediately came to mind:
1. Mid-air crashes with packages and drones falling from the sky killing people below resulting from a sky filled with drones flying every which way like swarms of hornets from enemy nests creating random chaos in the sky. They'd be routinely crashing into and taking down Lifeline helicopters which must use the 0-500 foot airspace. What do you tell a family of someone who could have been saved by a civilian "Dustoff" when a drone delivering someone's XBox or gaming laptop crashes into it with a rotor strike, and the four ton helicopter plummets from the sky without any warning to those on the ground, at 32 feet per second squared (acceleration of gravity), killing everyone on board plus the three people in the home it crashes into -- or countless dozens of children in the grade school it turns into a blazing inferno with its jet fuel.
2. Roving gangs tracking drones to immediately steal the package, drone, or both when it attempts delivery. Theft of parcel service packages (e.g. UPS, FEDEX, DHL, etc.) and U.S. mail tracking and tailing delivery trucks was already rampant in Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside Counties in the mid-1980's, with mail carriers being MURDERED for delivery truck contents, and it's gotten increasingly worse. I wouldn't expect a package dropped from a drone onto my front lawn to last more than five minutes before being stolen. Then you have automatic lawn watering systems that will completely drench anything dropped onto a lawn. Worse yet, if someone retrieves the package when it's dropped, criminal gangs will MIURDER them to steal the package -- or bash their door down in a robbery and then kill the person to steal the package. This occurred in Southern California with gangs also tailing delivery and mail trucks. It's orders of magnitude easier to track and tail drones in the sky undetected compared to trucks on the streets.
These were obvious to me at the outset, not ten or fifteen years later, or even five years later. They were obvious from the beginning. Now you've got companies touting autonomous sidewalk roaming wheeled robots making deliveries. Yeah. Right. Same problem as roving gangs tracking package delivery and mail trucks except there's nobody to fend off the robbery or call for help. The number of successful deliveries would quickly be near zero.
Anyone who has ever been around a drone knows how LOUD they are. Now imagine hundreds of them flying around town all the time.
multirotors are also super inefficient energy-wise compared to the same distance traveled by ground or even by air with a small single rotor helicopter (which exist but can't be used for this for saftey reasons)
You wouldn’t notice them in a suburban environment (where yards exist). It’s not like all of your neighbors are ordering a bunch of stuff at the same time.
But what if someone orders something at 3 am? Entire neighborhood wakes up to see that mf order some Ben&Jerry's ice cream
@@shawdowclone Then city council restricts to reasonable hours.
Yes, thank you. I made a post about this myself. No one covers the NOISE these things make. Imagine if the early enthusiasm had become reality, and we had swarms of the things overhead, driving us crazy.
The truth is we are years away from having both the technology and the legal authorization to make it feasible. The big players are holding their investments until those two things are fixed. In the mean time all the issues you’ve mentioned are slowly being solved. Its still coming, its just not ready yet.
Beyond visual line of sight, pilotless flight, and saturated air-space are the 3 big hurdles. Where & how a drone delivers a box is hardly the issue anymore.
Believe in JESUS today, confess and repent of your sins. No one goes to heaven for doing good but by believing in JESUS who died for our sins. GOD loves you soo much unconditionally.😍😚🤗
@@alunesh12345 right this tech innovation needs more time. Imo AR glasses are the big thing coming next.
Haven't we achieved unmanned flight already with AI? Or was that ran on a simulator
In Australia Googles Wing has actually overcome the legal hurdles. CASA (Australia's Aviation Authority) is now happy that wing can fly autonomously without putting people at risk (although i think the drone has like 16 props in total for redundancy) and has their approval. However the thing holding it back at the moment is actually birds. Many birds are attacking the drones.
Ha! your comment is actually legit cute :3 i think you have forgotten what the 2010s were like and how much we have actually advanced.. you look about 25 so i think you're forgetting or ignorant on what we have accomplished.
Remote pilot here, there's just way too many little technical details that all must be in alignment for DDS to work, otherwise it's just flat out unsafe and unreliable. There are areas where it works and being implemented, but they are very straight forward and linear. It is impossible to have a blanket system in place. You have to have a single, repeatable, low variability mission. The issue with "we want to deliver packages to people". is there's million questions and variables that need to be addressed with that statement, and it won't take off because paying someone to just drive it is 100x easier and cheaper than hiring a 107 certified remote pilot and then developing new infrastructure AND technology. Too much risk.
As a recreational drone pilot, I'm kinda glad that drone delivery isn't going anywhere. It would most likely mean that all airspace within a few miles of a delivery hub would be resricted, meaning I wouldn't be able to fly near my home since I live near an Amazon warehouse. Also, it would only be available during the summer because of rain.
I love the idea of zipline sending supplies to hospitals, but I don't need a drone delivering me my small packages.
Here in Norway almost all of packages you order online, if not paid for home delivery, gets delivered to your local grocery store as many of them have a post service integrated into the store. Now, that the drones would not work well with delivering packages to your home was pretty obvious from the beginning, but what could work is if drones would deliver these packages to special pickup points, like in Norway, regular grocery stores, where an employee would remove the package from the drone and make it ready for you to pick it up. This way you could still get your delivery in hours
Nice
the grocery store pickup point is basically a mini airport haha
But the store is going to be receiving many packages at the same time. So now it makes more sense to simply put them in a van and drive them...
@@bbgun061 Not necessary. It all depends on location and how many stores would accept the packages.
Same in Estonia. There's just a bunch of lockers and a screen where you insert your delivery code and your locker opens up. Simple and effective.
The solution to the last mile problem is very simple: don't. Just use pick up locations at stores or warehouses. It is way cheaper and most people likely won't find it inconvenient. Delivery to home is generally seen as an inconvenience where i live since you have to be home when it arrives or you risk having it stolen.
seriously. or establish collection stations that actually work (aka, aren't always overfilled or in other shops where I feel bad about interrupting business)
If this was optional, yes. I live in a apartment where the front door is directly on the sidewalk and it’s tiring to have to constantly get waken up early or when I’m busy to get some package that my family orders.
But I can see why people would want it delivered to their house, maybe they don’t want the inconvenience to go to a warehouse and carry a super large package out, or maybe when it’s a small object that isn’t just worth the hassle.
Maybe some fee to deliver it and alternatively no fee if you pick it up.
This has been implemented in Israel for years.
For non-food deliveries you can choose a home delivery at a higher cost, or a low cost delivery to pick-up locations, usually grocery stores and the like within a 5-10 minute walk of your apartment.
The businesses that serve as pick-up locations are compensated per package delivered.
@@udishomer5852 Same worked out in Southern India as well, typical end points are medical stores and parsel services - though amazon seems to be more brute forcing with their home delivery
Very true. I have mine delivered to a post office even though it delays pickup time by a day
Europe enjoy parcel boxes. Certain countries have network of automated boxes as dense as corner shops. So no last mile problem and no waiting for delivery man. The box opens up via mobile app whenever convenient to pick it up from the machine. Delivery person drops bulky number of parcel 1 once twice a day depending on demand making it fuel efficient, some use solar power to drive electric van only.
The US has had these types of hubs for years as well, it's not a European thing. It's also not even comparable to the subject of this video. That's not "delivery", it's just "remote access/pick-up hub" since the customer has to do the work to get their purchase the last step of the way.
I feel like prompting an option for buyers to pick up their goods in a central location like a supermarket nearby in exchange for some reward points is probably far more practical.
Thank you so much for touching on the Hype Cycle. It's a crucial part of technology development, scalability & deployment. Loads of people have stories about technologies that promised the moon but disappeared. Many of those stories tout "Oh, well, it's too good they couldn't make money on it so they buried it." Usually that's bullshit, the technology was all hype and it died in The Valley of Death.
Well that or the big oil lobby bought all the patents and then buried it because they'd rather keep destroying the planet and getting rich because they'll be dead before anything bad happens. Corporations are quite literally run by psychopaths.
In Bavaria drinking beer at your desk is not missmanagement,n it's lunch
Drone delivery seems like it would be more practical with an end point more like a post office in small areas, like for deliveries around the San Luis valley, or other areas with disbursed small towns
Sure, but you could just send a van there with all the deliveries, like they do at the moment.
I currently work for Prime Air and I'm pretty excited for the future. The concerns raised are all valid and real issues but from what I see it's still far from dead
I think Amazon's drone delivery is a solution that doesn't work for a problem that doesn't really exist.
Logistically, it's not that much faster then a guy in a car and Amazon's grand scheme of same-day or 2-day delivery was already pushing things (and wasn't so much driven by consumer demand as it was because of Amazon desperately trying to strangle brick and mortar to death after conquering the internet), and computerized quadcopters will never be more energy-efficient than land travel. In fact, a quadcopter may be the least energy-efficient form of air travel and wouldn't scale at all.
Quadcopters are "inefficient" but can still be more efficient than a car when delivering something small, because they don't have to move the car.
For consumers, you are right, but for Amazon, it solves a real problem: humans are fickle workers, robots are not. If Amazon was able to get self driving vans and drones working well, it could theoretically fire most of their last mile workers and would not have to worry about ever increasing paychecks or unions.
You just haven’t thought of putting *wings* on the drones, and have it use *the air* and *the wind* (maybe even to recharge its battery, at least to extend the finite battery life)
Plus, I don’t really get what you think you’re seeing in *current & incomplete battery technology* that’ll very easily change things
VTOL is a lot more demanding than the Bernoulli-Newtonian force, although necessary if you don’t have the space
“form of *air travel* “
But that’s just it : *Air travel > Ground travel* ; you don’t have to pave an AIRway, and there’s a entire 3rd dimension
@@donaldhobson8873 Except when every individual delivery has to get its own little vehicle flight, the scaling nullifies the advantages over a car.
@Nicholas Leclerc That does work, and then it's no longer a quadcopter.
Yeah, this is a "Cool but impractical" type thing in my opinion.
Zipline's operation seems like it'd be the best way to operate such a niche, since it bypasses most infrastructure and geographical barriers and a clinic that's designed to accept such delivery from a central hub can likely maintain a landing area fairly easily. Or for longer distance shipments perhaps even a recharging/relaunching system so the planes can deliver at the further extent of their range without needing to factor for the return trip.
Agreed. I’ll also add “maybe not even needed” for the majority of the population.
Like you said, the zip line application seems much more likely to stick.
@@acidtears oh god the hyper loop….dude just built a less efficient subway system and then is too busy patting himself on the back to listen to any of the critiques.
@@acidtears yeah I loved the idea of a Hyperloop when I first heard about it but then the more I heard the more it becomes a sort of "wait a minute"
@@SaveMoneySavethePlanet
The idea is basically as old as subways. But all that's happening now is nowhere near economical.
However, no one is talking about the only feasible way this will ever work, and probably the best way of all. I'm imagining a massive global system of tracks, likely mostly underground, that hits all the major cities and important transportation hubs. You would only accelerate a small cab of people up to the thousands of miles an hour possible in a proper hyperloop (regenerative breaking will be critical here). The passengers would board a larger vessel that never slows down, traveling around the whole track continuously, with enough vehicles running at all times that you can always just catch the next one.
This idea already exists between planets, it's called a cycler orbit. For this to work on earth you would need a near perfect vacuum tube and a nearly perfectly frictionless track, aka entirely superconducting. This would be a mega civil project, far larger than anything else ever attempted, even larger than the space elevator or skyhook that we'll likely already have at this point. I guess if we're talking deep tech, tho, I think Musk's idea of point-to-point passenger rockets isn't as crazy as it sounds.
@Zaydan Naufal
Trains are great, but you have to accelerate the entire train up to speed and down every time (regenerative breaking is helping here), and it has all the standard friction and weather problems. Trains will never go away, but I believe I outlined the ultimate mode of transportation in my previous post. It won't even be technologically feasible for at least a century.
To be able to drink beer at your desk in the morning is the prime reason I got into tech to begin with. If you do not do it too often, it can be a really nice way to motivate yourself to fix boring problems. But too often is ofc not good.
I remember first noticing the Gartner Hype cycle as a kid reading up on the Space Shuttle. As a kid I loved space and borrowed all the books about it I could from the school library and the kid section at the public library. The school library being a public american school had some hilariously out of date books that projected weekly shuttle launches, regular satellite deployments, other nations piggybacking on the shuttle concept with the Buran and Hermes shuttles, and the start of Space Station Freedom (what would become the ISS), but I read them anyway along with more modern books on the topic. It wasn't long before I noticed similar patterns with other things, like laserdiscs (one of my teachers insisted it would be the way of the future), plasma TVs, and hybrid vehicles. And began noticing it, particularly with classic science fiction that extrapolated the potential of then-new technologies, often beyond what the technology could actually achieve. Never knew the name for it though.
I was a student at Virginia Tech when Google started delivering Chipotle burritos. We had to go to a dedicated area away from campus and stand inside a big net, watching the drone lower our box of food to the ground outside the net. It was dope, and the burrito was tasty. Kinda bummed the concept never took off.
Haha you aren’t kidding. Remember what happened to that traveling robot when it went through Philadelphia? I think he still has the occasional nightmare when he’s not dreaming of electric sheep.
Yay to Zipline! The only aerial drone supply system that actually works sustainably and realistically - for now. Although I personally doubt that aerial drone delivery systems (especially in urban and suburban areas) will ever take off due to the associated noise of the drones.
I can tell you here south of Phoenix in Tucson we were probably never gonna get drones even if they did become a thing most likely because amazon decided to build their fulfillment center right next to Davis Monthan airforce base. which the only way past is a small sunken road between the base and a plane storage yard.
13:30 shows Starship robots. My university uses them for kids that want to get something from one of the dining locations, cafes, or minimarts on campus. They work fantastic for a campus- but they're slow. Like 45 minutes between ordering and getting your food. Expanding it beyond a campus seems impractical.
I think ground based delivery drones have a lot of issues as well. The problem with those are not the last metre, but the whole journey. They've got the same issues as self driving cars, but typically with a far more cluttered environment, with more obstacles, and more opportunities for damage or sabotage.
Agreed. I feel like everyone assumes we’re much closer to fully self driving vehicles then we actually are.
Don't forget thieves!
@@SaveMoneySavethePlanet Believe in JESUS today, confess and repent of your sins. No one goes to heaven for doing good but by believing in JESUS who died for our sins. GOD loves you soo much unconditionally.😍😚🤗
So the obvious solution is an aerial drone that drops a ground-based drone on the road in front of the target property to travel the last few meters. 😄
How about best of both worlds? If those drones would fly longer distances between some certain landing points and then drive the last metres on the ground to the customers door?
This was no surprise to those of us in the R/C aeromodeling community, we already knew that the technology wasn't there yet and won't be for decades. The problem with this whole idea is that sooner or later one of these things will plow into the side of an apartment building at 60mph of fall onto a busy freeway and cause a pileup and then the lawsuits and demands from the public to limit where they're allowed to go will start to happen.
"But we'll just make sure that never happens"
lol, no you won't because that's actually impossible.
Bingo.
You don't think lidar would have seen the building?
@@2beJT Anything can fail, Radar, Lidar, Sonar, whatever you wanna put in the drone, its a balance between cost, technology and weight. Its not going to be common, in fact so uncommon when it happens it makes the news, but even airplanes crash once in awhile.
@@phrog2579 might sound crazy here, bit think about it; flight plans, routes designed for these aircraft to travel that would avoid obstacles and be as fast as possible
@@byojuwon Yes, just set up a network of air traffic controllers everywhere, to supervise pizza delivery! Oh, these are highly educated personnel and quite costly? No problem, Artificial Idiots will solve all our future problems!
How about some kind of drone delivery and sender box? Separate company would operate drones, which could autonomously pick and deliver stuff from box to box (box would shut afterwards and you get contents with code). Company could register to service and you could buy a box on your owned land and register it (like on a yard of an apartment house for everyone to use). Would be cheap, if tech works and lasts.
its all nice to think about. most large drones have huge battery packs that weigh almost as much as the drone itself. that limits how far a drone can fly already. but strap a 20 kg 3d printer to the bottom of that drone and it will not be able to lift off at all. building a bigger drone makes it heavier, more expensive and also more dangerous to people on the ground if it fails for some reason. drones have their use cases but not in delivery, like what Amazon was trying to do.
People already freak out when you fly a toy drone down the street. I can't imagine how crazy the backlash would be if the sky were suddenly filled with the things
It's bizarre to me that this wasn't described as the main issue. People don't want the sky filled with drones, especially in the UK. They're pollution, visual and auditory and while they might be high for most of their flights, they wouldn't be during drop off.
This is one of those technologies that should aim to be greatly beneficial to a niche market, rather than seek to take over the transportation sector as a whole. If you live on a rural homestead/farm/cottage/etc in Canada, Sweden, The US, or Australia, this could be immensely valuable: Imagine working on a boat or your house and being able to instantly order the tools and materials you need. It also doesn't seem to take that much to get a (small scale) drone hub going, all you need is 1 drone per 10 delivery vans and you have a new transportation option. Maybe postal services should be adopting it - Instead of Amazon droning something to your home, it would deliver it's packages in bulk to the postal agency, which could then, depending on circumstances, drive a van to your home or send a drone to your more rural location.
Limited capacity makes drones useless for bulk delivery though. 5 lbs is about 100-150 first class letters.
It might be useful delivering letters to a remote location, but at 5lbs, i'd just ride to the store and put it in a back pack. It would even be fine in a shopping bag.
Within less than 1 minute of seeing amazons claims I was already picking holes in their claims and realising that it was only a pr stunt/scam that would never happen in the next 20 years and only ment to make them seem forward thinking.
I am not surprised.
Remembered the 3D printing services at major courier locations?
Companies no longer have to ship their prototype to client location but just to send a file to 3D print it. I wonder how successful this concept has been.
Throughout the video, I kept thinking of another video I saw the other day, of the Corridor Crew, where they were discussing how a very cool shot in a tv show was accomplished. It was an aerial shot that looked like a drone shot, but it ended as a ground-level steadycam shot.
They were considering that it could have been a drone shot all the way down, when the camera was then handed over to someone with a steadycam.
Then the guest, the specialist, said that could never be how it was done, because drones (using the type of drones capable of carrying big rig camera's - similar to delivery drones) are never allowed on sets where people are underneath them. The comment was: these things are awesome, but they do get out of control sometimes; I've seen that happen and it's not pretty.
I have to wonder how much safer these delivery drones are going to be than those rigs that even still have a human operator on site to try 'something'. Even if they become orders of magnitude safer, it's still hard to imagine them becoming safe enough for densely populated areas.
I am a cinematographer and a drone op photographer. We fly on and over sets all the time. The law is that everyone under the drone has to agree to be there. There are also FAA waivers given daily for certified and licensed operators to fly over buildings, traffic and pedestrians.
All it would take would be one kid trying to grab one and getting cut up. And kids do that kind of thing all the time.
@@gl15col you could make that argument about so many new technologies. autonomous driving for example. for years, people have been saying similar things and yet here we are, on the cusp of full automation. BUT that is not what I was talking about. I was specifically referring to the comment about film/television productions
@@nakamoto9724 we are nowhere near full automation, to say we're "on the cusp" is laughable. What we have today in cars is glorified adaptive cruise control. The only vehicles that are anywhere close to full autonomy are airliners. To achieve that level of autonomy safely, it takes millions of dollars of radio equipment at the end of every runway, and the good judgement of the pilot, not to mention an entire network of human ATC. Autonomy comparable to autoland is never going to be achievable on the road.
@@tissuepaper9962 i laugh daily in my tesla plaid. u should try it.
Solution: make each package a smart bomb, load up a b-52 with the "packages", each targeting the delivery point for the respective customer, and deliver a small city's worth of packages all at once. People complain about their house being bombed? Too bad, you have a fleet of b-52's.
You can do this with your car, no need for drones, it’s more cost-efficient, just make sure to get rid of the car afterwards. Things get difficult if you don’t…
How about an automated car or van with a grabber arm, it picks up the package from the hold and keeps it on your door
B52? This isn't WW2.
@@RealMTBAddict bruh
@@RealMTBAddict I think you're thinking of the B-25. Two very different bombers.
Because it's a plastic quad drone that weighs 4 pounds, can't fly in windy or rainy weather, is sensitive to changes in weather, can only carry one thing at a time, has to deliver hundreds of packages a day, has very limited range as it needs to be directly controlled (or risk it going places it shouldn't from tiny errors), can't be used around airports or military bases, and is run using a battery that couldn't likely cross a city and make it back once without a recharge. A truck can deliver many more packages, can be used in most any weather, can go to places around restricted airspace, can easily handle heavy loads, can easily drive across a city multiple times, doesn't need complicated software/human operators are easy to train, and issues do not cause them to drop out of the sky onto people, roads, and homes. Drones are in no way perfect, and the only group with drones that COULD manage all of the things needed of package delivery are tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, need places to touch down and take off, and are both only accessible to the military and only equipped with military equipment. Which unlike a package, it doesn't matter if a JDAM is hurtling down from 5000 feet. It's going to explode anyways. As long as it arms, it'll do what it's supposed to. Which I sincerely hope isn't even remotely comparable to your Amazon packages.
What if the delivery trucks had docks on them. The driver could roll up to a given neighborhood or streed and they would never need to get out of the truck. They could just keep rolling down the road as the drone makes a very short trip to the address then returns and docks to the truck. Probably would never happen, but it would be neat.
Dope scifi idea at the very least.
@@josephwodarczyk977 I officially give permission to any sci-fi writer or film producer to use this idea under one condition: I must be somewhere in the credits. Thanks 😁
Drone deliveries may work well in rural areas, where the "last mile" cost is higher (more driving distance and time per delivery), pending battery technology maturing in the coming years to provide significantly greater flying time/range.
Rural areas are where they work LEAST well, and only partly because of the greater distances. Mostly it's because rural areas tend to be badly mapped. If you don't work delivery you tend not to notice it because you aren't going to a hundred plus places a day. But a lot of the rural areas of the country are very poorly done in map databases. Missing roads, homes with GPS locations off by sometimes nearly a mile, false addresses inserted in the databases, entire areas with homes that show up but don't have associated addresses in the databases. It can take several days just to train a new driver in a rural area all the places where you CAN'T follow the GPS because it's not accurate. And those sort of things are pure death to a drone based delivery scheme.
Drones would become target practice in to many rural areas in the U.S.... 😂😂😂🎯
@@mojavedesertsonorandesert9531 yep, they would.
The worst thing about the delivery drones is how the FAA has come down on fixed wing RC hobbyists with needless regulations.
You can thank the idiots in the hobby, albeit, that was inevitable either way the same as copter drones versus fixed wing drones.
No No, the reason for stupid regulations is stupid regulators, in this case the stupid people are FAA people.
@@j.ballsdeep420 Actually you are wrong. The hobby is very safe. There are NO documented deaths due to hobby drones, injuries are very rare. I have been in RC for about 40 years and have only seen one incident where someone was hit by an RC aircraft. The aircraft was flying very slow, no one injured. FAA became involved because the "industry" bought some politicians who revoked the exemption that RC had from the FAA so they could take over the airspace 0-500 feet for deliveries. If any of these industry experts had talked to people with RC experience they would have discovered that weather, obstacles, etc would preclude their use for deliveries. The FAA is being sued by the RC industry right now. Initial input from the judge on the case is not promising for the FAA, plus the delivery industry has lost interest.
@@chuckwain5591 You may have been in the hobby for a long time, but you sure as fuck don't know everything. People have been killed by R/C models. Look up Roman Pirozek Jr., who was killed by an R/C helicopter. Bonus if you can find the grisly photos, too.
@@whoknows8678 Guess your language is a sign of great intelligence :-). Note that I specifically said that drones/quadcopters have not caused a death, can't speak for other aspects of the hobby. Nice try at changing my comment. You are still wrong in your analysis. I actually watched part of the Senate hearings were the big tech companies specifically targeted the exemption that RC had from FAA regulation. They bought lobbyists that convinced the politicians to change the law.
I’m really surprised that thieves with shotguns wasn’t mentioned. That was the first thing I thought of when I first heard about this concept 10 years ago. I’m not even American.
As a long time drone pilot, I saw the prospect of delivery drones being unrealistic from the get go for all the reasons mentioned. Add to it payload limitations and unpredictable weather. Heck, a tree or a clothesline would wreak havoc on the system. Of course, as a pilot we suddenly became burdened with all the new regulations that came about to help facilitate a future sky ridden with automated delivery drones and the need to capitulate the airspace that they would require.
As an apartment-dweller, I wonder how they'd deal with that. I don't have a lawn to drop the package on, and what if someone else gets to my package before me? We already have a problem with delivered packages disappearing before the rightful owner gets to them in the basement where most packages are left by delivery people. (Ha, as I write this it gets mentioned in the video.)
Bezos was unaware that some humans live in apartments.
@@ErikDJ123 Bezos was aware of people leaving work for home?
We need to bring back those vacuum tubes that go *FWOMP* and bring you the parcel.
would probably be less common if it wasn't looked down on to take care of the problem but too many people have feeling for all and seeming mostly for criminal assholes
RIP apartments wouldn’t work.
I don't know, but I never gave in to the hype of drone delivery. Mostly, I don't want my package damaged and the delivery drivers sometimes are nice enough to hide your package for you. Drone wouldn't do that. And I caught on to that air space thing every early on. Also, what if the drone malfunctions and then you have the big thing falling from the sky at any random spot!
I feel like the only people fully getting on the hype train were investors.
@@SaveMoneySavethePlanet There are consumers that are excited for new tech and trends. People that buy things that they don't need just cause it's new and exciting.
Most of the time the drone will get to your house in a matter of minutes, not hours, so when you order something and select drone delivery, you will be expecting it so you’ll be at home and ready for it.
However the other issue can happen. If a drone malfunction happens it can fall from the sky. 🤦🏻♂️
And yes, that would really suck. Haha
@@madensmith7014 so... Women?
I was super excited about Zipline, and when I read the title of the video I said, "Wait, Zipline is still expanding, Wendover! They are the future of medical deliveries in Africa!" Thank you for discussing them, and for the news that they're expanding into the US, too. Good things for a wonderful company!
Amazon Prime Air has been announced to come to Italy, I wonder how they'll manage everything.
I could see a scenario where these are used like Zipline, but here in europe there is no need outside nice things ultra niche applications like uhhh...delivering medicines on rural areas. But in continental europe this rarely needs to be done by air, plus places like islands work out much better with big shipments since all of them are really near or far the coast.
I live in the country. The local power utility decided to do line and pole inspections with a big drone. In the first week half the drones had been shot gunned by irate farmers who did not like a drone buzzing over their house.
Drones might work in a city but not in the country where everybody has a shotgun.
USA problems.
No one can invade USA More to fear the farmers than the US military
I'll still go with the drone cause it's easier than sending workers to do it slowly than drone that get up there in second
Maybe have the drones make less sound? Owls are able to fly silently, I'm sure solutions are to be found.
@@crhu319 at least we can do something about drones flying over our house lol
If this really took off and became widespread, I think the noise would be far more annoying that the ground vehicle noise we already have.
Well that problem would probably spur the quiet rotor answer to mitigate that problem and maybe even throwing baffles around the blades could provide a solution maybe.
I saw one of those food delivery robots crossing the street in front of me. Halfway across the street, it stops, acts confused, then, it moved on. It seemed to me that it put itself in danger needlessly.
Delivery drones could revolutionize the way we receive our packages, making the process faster and more efficient than ever before!
I never saw it actually happening
BOT
Same. It's so obviously inefficient
It flys over my house frequently, truth is: Super noisy! I want to shoot it down.
There are so many possible problems with such a system, that anyone with common sense knows this would fail, especially in highly populated areas.
Adam something would of made a good video about this.
yes, for exemple flying objects use a lot of eenrgy compered to simple electric cargo bikes. I understand traffic is a problem, so why not solve it? Sometimes with theese new tecnologies it seams that they are trying to find a problem for a solution and not the other way around
Way too easy to just snatch that package right out of the sky, far from front door cameras. And that's what always made me leary of this idea.
It all depends on how it’s implemented.
There are companies successfully making deliveries right now via drone.
Granted it can’t carry too much weight but for simple small things, it’s super convenient to have it flown to you.
This is all I needed to hear in order to buy more shares
This is one of those things that, on paper, seems really cool and really great, but in practice it's completely unreliable. The issues caused by noise, people will definitely shoot them down because... People, people already steal packages and this makes it even easier as it someone can spot a drone and just follow it. Btw all the other issues that were pointed out in the video. The ground based automation is much more logical and likely to succeed. But there's still many issues with that as well.
One of the biggest concerns with drones (and other robot delivery) is theft. If packages flying in the skies get common, some people will take down drones, by shooting them down, or jamming them, Package thieves may not have to wait for the packages to be on the porch, to steal it, and the drone itself is also a prize.
Hi Sam - I watched this, then UA-cam took me down a rabbit hole of watching a bunch of your videos, and I loved them all, but I think the more recent ones are better - higher production values, nicer microphone, more confident voice over, better joke delivery etc.
So I came back here to say "Well Done for continuously improving your already outstanding videos, you're a great treasure of the internet" rather than commenting on one of the old ones saying "this one is worse"
Sam sounds like the guy from Wendover Productions tbh.
Thank you