Sadly there is no reasonable path to doing this legally. We are in the real estate photography business and the FAA started cracking down on people using helicopters and other UAV's for commercial purposes. It's not allowed. You can only fly drones/helicopters/etc remotely (or autonomously) as a hobby.
FAA, county health department, municipal regulations on restaurant delivery... Tacocopter is up against a nearly vertical hill of red tape, but the utterly fantastic thing is that we're having this conversation. It's happening, it's here, there's nothing even close to a legal framework for it yet, but this is just one new facet of a massive shift we're witnessing. Like the internet, drones and autonomous vehicles may have been born of the defense world, but they'll truly come of age in the civilian world.
This is just another little taster of the wild ride we're in for.
I'm pretty certain there'll be many an unexpected incident when/if people start up something like Tacocopter. Specifically, how many drones you're going to lose to seagulls and hawks tackling them for food.
You'd be talking custom made machines, because you just know some idiot is going to hook a box of chow mien noodles onto the skid of a robocopter and it'll get dive-bombed by a pigeon and land on someone's wind shield in the middle of rush hour traffic.
The problem that robotic helicopters, and other flying devices, are going to face is that they're legally liable for anything they damage below them if something falls. When you're 50' up, you don't want to be dropping a single thing over a roadway or side walk. It also brings up the questions of insurance, registration (to ensure all UAV's flying are insured and maintained) and more, because any accidents have the potential to be equal to a motor vehicle accident in terms of personal injury claim.
Operators literally have to have no choice to make sure there's the ability for them to get sued for accidents/drops, otherwise municipalities will quickly outlaw them and once that happens it's going to be decades before those municipalities change their minds.
> I'm pretty certain there'll be many an unexpected incident when/if people start up something like Tacocopter.
so what? there are thousands of car accidents and deaths every year that doesnt stop majority from riding. What OP did is open my eyes on something I didnt think of before. Imagine a crowded city, like NY where 5 feet above your head there are hundreds of drones like bees flying everywhere and delivering goods: food, small mail, lighweight groceries, etc. That would be great win for problems with traffic in big cities. Mother Earth would appreciate that too. Awesome idea OP.
EDIT: you could also have personal delivery done this way, something like "electronic mail pigeon". You attach your lighweight package and you send it across the city. Of course we would need to minimum probability of accidents. Most likely software used would have to be governmet-approved/tested and you would have to have a license to be a part of "lightweight transportation channel" that flows above the city. But this is totally doable!
> Imagine a crowded city, like NY where 5 feet above your head there are hundreds of drones like bees flying everywhere and delivering goods: food, small mail, lighweight groceries, etc.
Excellent visualization. You've nailed the kind of socio-infrastructural change this shift could lead to.
Ah, I knew I was missing a few more things. Yes, as much as the slow-moving regulatory world may raise a lot of well-deserved, techno-libertarian ire, I think we can all agree what you're describing is good red tape.
Licensure, state registration, federally-mandated commercial drone manufacturing standards, and liability insurance may sound like a damper on the future, but by ensuring a baseline of safety and reliability, it will ultimately open up the market to all sorts of innovation.
Bureaucrats are just not ready for robots. If you thought it was funny to watch an old "powerful" man reduced to a fumbling idiot by simple computer technology, you're going to love the robot revolution. I just hope they don't do too much damage bike-shedding a world where even the simplest precepts are impossibly far beyond them.
I think algoshift brought up some very valid concerns in his post. The government and its bureaucrats have legitimate reasons to put in safety regulations surrounding unmanned commercial aircraft before allowing for their widespread use.
Absolutely unfortunate. I watched a short film last night, shot with an omni-copter -- and my mind just spun with the possible opportunities for the creative filmmaker -- let alone other industries this could impact.
It's funny, at several points while watching that video, I felt that I was looking at a 3D animation -- precisely because virtual cameras aren't constrained by the motion range of physical equipment, so animators sometimes end up keyframing camera trajectories that feel unrealistic.
Slight correction, Congress passed a funding bill for the FAA. As a condition of funding, they require that FAA comes up with regulations for unmanned aerial systems (UAS) within 3 years.
As of today, the only legal way to fly a UAS in the U.S. requires case-by-case authorization.
Although I have up voted you, it is known that humans are more prepared to face new dangers than software applications. And a quad-copters flying over a city is exposed to a multitude of unknown dangers that its software may not expect, thus it's plausible that in the same situation of danger a human may find better solutions than a quad-copter.
You are right that humans are better when it comes to adapting to new situations. But that doesn't matter. What matters is risk vs reward. For automobiles, we have about 40,000 deaths each year. But as a society we accept that cost because the utility of cars is worth even more. The same thing will eventually happen with UAVs. The utility will offset the cost.
I'm not saying that I don't want to see UAVs flying over my head. I'm just saying that maybe a bit of over-prudence is justified here.
Should we start testing UAVs for commercial applications? Yes. Should we allow 13 years old kids to code on them and build their new cool pizza delivery service? Not yet, I think. Just my $0.02.
The solution to that is good regulation, not complete banning. While software has the disadvantage of being unable to adapt on the fly, it has the advantage of never making mistakes - if it's written correctly, it will not randomly fail. That's decidedly not the case for humans, as we see every day with automobile accidents.
Software is only a part of it. I deal every day with software that doesn't randomly fail -- we write damn good code -- but the hardware it controls has failure modes that can't always be predicted, or are so unlikely that no one thought of it.
Realize here that we're not talking about software running on a server in a nice temperature controlled room. This is software controlling hardware that is under constant vibration, will get sticky, or bend, or break, or ice up under variable conditions - hot, dry, rainy, wind gusts as it goes from behind a building to crossing an intersection. There is a mind boggling number of things that can go wrong when you're controlling a device in the 'real world.'
Even if the software is perfect there is still a large number of variables to account for and most of them can't be controlled. There's a case for UAVs and I would love to get involved with them, but building a reliable UAV and properly maintaining it would almost certainly cost too much to have it deliver tacos. Unless you're willing to spend $250 to avoid walking a few blocks.
Well, virtually all modern cars have software running critical systems. How is that regulated? I don't think it would be too difficult to adapt those regulations to flying "tacocopters".
One of the most basic safety measures cars take is to reboot critical systems several times an hour and have mechanical backups so the breaks both work and can overpower the engine. You can't exactly do that with a drone.
I am not aware of a single automotive subsystem controller (or any other embedded system for that matter) that reboots as a preventative mechanism. For handling an unrecoverable error, yes, that's standard practice. But rebooting in an attempt to prevent errors? That screams bad design.
It'd be interesting if you could find a loophole. Maybe the tacos are technically free and it could be argued that flying them somewhere could be done as a hobby, and you're required to give a donation to a separate entity for the order to go through.
You have users pay for the taco and a rental of the toy helicopter which they "fly" to themselves (with taco) –– include a webcam on the copter and bam! Hobby/toy.
(I wish it were that easy... tacocopter clearly qualifies as something I absolutely never knew that I really really need right now)
Heck, the for the first order or two, the taco may just be a bonus feature until the novelty of seeing my neighborhood/city from a new perspective, in real-time, wore off.
For awhile, people who did aerial photography with rado-controlled helicopters tried to use a loophole. The invoice would itemize that the only fee was for post-processing (photoshop) of the images. FAA ignored it until recently. Lately, they've been really cracking down on any commercial usage whatsoever. Even Utah Highway Patrol got in trouble with the FAA for flying without the proper authorizations.
There's a reason that there's no path to doing this legally.
1) Have you ever flown an RC plane? Do you know a) How difficult it is? b) How little control you have? c) How dangerous it is if not controlled? That's why (sane) people fly their planes in big fields away from people, trees, power lines, clotheslines, satellite dishes, etc.
2) More broadly, we are only beginning to have good algorithms for awareness of automobile traffic conditions. (Google's work with driverless cars, for example.) This is basically 2-D work on roads, which are specifically designed to avoid interference from external sources. None of these apply to drone aircraft. In addition to the obstacles above, how do avoid all the potential objects (other drones, birds, party balloons, etc) in proximity? We're nowhere near close to solving these problems.
3) Yes, there are accidents by delivery drivers every day. But it's clear who's responsible for any damage: the human driver(s) who are presumed to be carefully monitoring the entire process. Are mom and pop taco houses (or any other sized business) prepared to take the full liability of an autonomous flying thing? I doubt it.
All the videos we've seen (and I admit some are breathtaking) have been created by people firmly at the controls, whose full attention is focused on the task, and who are prepared to take the responsibility for any problems they cause.
Quadrotor robot control is pretty good already and getting better quickly. You can buy these things off the shelf with GPS waypoint navigation. Completely autonomous. Not perfectly reliable in all conditions, but already usable on a calm day. Thus the control difficulty is not an issue in the medium term.
Many people have enjoyed the quadrotor videos from labs such as UPenn's GRASP lab. No one at the controls. Though the miniature flyers at Penn do use external localization and pre-computed trajectories, others are completely autonomous and react in real time.
I know of someone (here in Norway) trying to build up a business doing precisely this (filming things, such as snowboard and ski events) via a remote-controlled helicopter.
Or they just don't want large hunks of metal with sharp spinning things possibly falling out of the sky onto people and things, and so would like to regulate the use of large flying things.
How about a mechanical fail-chute? The UAV could be equipped with a dead-man switch style parachute/inflatable life raft contraption that would trigger if the rotors stopped turning and if the device was flying high enough, it could float harmlessly to earth cocooned in a pocket of sturdy material buffered by some quantity of air. If you could figure out how to make it work, you could be in about as much danger as getting hit in the head by a beach ball...
Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. It's probably not going to be implemented across the board without some level of regulation, though. If they get to the point where they're passively safe, and require little skill to operate safely, the govt. might get to the point of fairly relaxed restrictions on them, like drivers licenses now.
This is not valid reasoning. Under this logic, we could feasibly be just as alarmed by balconies of any sort or platforms at any height greater than one story.
[Edit]: Which is not to say that there are hurtling objects on these things, but that this is talking about What Happens Least, and there is just as much risk of something falling from a balcony or second+ story area as there is a drone falling mid-flight.
There's a reason many sidewalks in NYC have sidewalk "sheds" covering them. Balconies usually aren't directly over places where people walk, for a reason. I'm guessing that this is due to laws.
To drop something really dangerous off of a balcony usually requires malice or gross negligence, and that generally goes straight down. The operator of a drone with crappy safety systems might simply have to leave it flying for too long without noticing the fuel gauge is nearing empty.
Once the FCC hashes out things like how drones should act automatically in safe ways such that untrained pilots can't easily kill multiple people with them by being slightly negligent or stupid, then I'm all for civilian drone flight.
I'm not sure I like the a priori nature assumed by the regulatory bodies. Why don't we legislate based on actual occurrences instead of just hypotheticals? I'm not sure why a law like this wouldn't work: "Any individual found to negligently operate a drone in a way that caused harm to persons or property will face jail time and fines".
Isn't that effectively the same as regulating the machine specifically, but without all of the overhead, corruption, and limitations on creativity, and wouldn't the law actually have the same effect if persons found to operate drones in an unsafe manner were actually prosecuted? Wouldn't the market only accept safe drones due to the possibility of jail time?
Just curious. Been kicking that line of thought around a lot as I've been in some creaky elevators recently.
As I see it, this is similar to food safety or mass-produced vehicle certification processes.
Unfortunately, modern markets are empirically fairly poor at optimizing for long-term outcomes with all externalities accounted for (example off the top of my head: the Deepwater Horizon oil spill).
When a major malfunction or accident does happen, no penalty or fine is really sufficient to bring about any meaningful sense of justice. (Think again the oil spill, or a tainted staple food poisoning tens of thousands of people, or to use a really cliché example, a malfunctioning UAV crashing into a group of kids playing at recess.) As the accidents are often due to incompetence or attempts at cost-cutting rather than outright malice, the deterrence factor of the penalty doesn't really apply – to those guilty, it just looks like they're taking the good kind of risk optimizing their systems until it's too late. The guilty corporation simply can go bankrupt and out of business, and finding and then charging personally responsible employees isn't always easy.
And yet Deepwater Horizon still happened. If the regulations that all rigs must use equipment bit x, y, and z, certified by industry conglomerate w, weren't in place, then maybe new, much safer technology would have been developed that would have made the spill not happen. If the market needs permission from bureaucrats, who may or may not be corrupt, or needs a new law passed, to adapt or develop better solutions to its problems, then it's no wonder we are stuck on obsolete tech that is 50+ years old and that the revenue in regulated markets is entirely dominated by a small oligopoly that holds everyone by the balls (see also phone companies).
Maybe, maybe not. What is the market motivation for developing and more importantly using technology which is safer on a 50-500 year scale? How high would you like the penalties for criminal negligence, manslaughter, etc, to be? Is it feasible for them to be higher than the potential savings on process optimization or cutting corners? Do you hold corporations or people, or both, responsible?
While government regulations might not be the most efficient, they do not cloud a picture of exactly how safe a plant is and will remain that would otherwise be perfectly clear. Short of each investor evaluating safety of each plant, oil rig, and factory themselves, the situation with government regulation removed would boil down to an analogy to the S&P credit rating business. We've seen how for-profit independent third-party rating business has worked out.
If you'd like an example from a market with little regulation, look no further than Bhopal.
I'm not going to argue that the current regulations we have in place are amazing. They're not and they can certainly be improved. I will, however, argue that they do a better job keeping us safer than the free market, as it has been implemented worldwide over the last century, would.
The FAA has always operated more like a white-list rather than a black-list. By default, nothing is allowed to fly in the national airspace. Then, regulations are added to allow a specific vehicle or a specific class of vehicles. At the moment, UAVs have not been white-listed, hence they are not legal.
Well that works fine until you're the one that's killed because of a failure. People after you are protected by the legislation passed, but you're SOL!
I don't think you understood -- I'm not suggesting we pass specific legislation detailing the cause of each accident after it happens. I suggest that we put in place generally applicable statutes for criminal negligence, manslaughter, etc. that would apply in case of malfunctioning industrial instruments. The law wouldn't change, but the market would automatically adapt and keep safe practices autonomously because the deterrent from the punishment was not worth the risk of cutting a few corners.
The difference is between being reactive and proactive.
Having a law in place is a start, but it has little effect against those who would cut corners. I believe the saying is that "laws only keep the lawful honest." There will be a lot of manufacturers building TacoCopters who will cut corners because it's cheaper, and others who simply don't care because the don't expect to get caught.
However, if the FAA mandates (e.g.,) complete engine teardown and rebuild every 200 operating hours along with an annual FAA inspection, they can actually verify that those procedures are being followed. The law will still be in effect, but verifying that it is being followed happens well before someone is killed and will take the vehicles most likely to kill someone out of the air.
>This is not valid reasoning. Under this logic, we could feasibly be just as alarmed by balconies of any sort or platforms at any height greater than one story
This is why we have building codes and regulations. Since the FAA did not have these regulations in place, it was disallowed (commercially.) Congress recently said "make the regulations" because it seems like there is enough demand to justify the increased burden on the taxpayer.
That's exactly what I'm getting at, here. The accusations of this being because there is an ominous police state is ludicrous when we could just put expectations of responsibility in place.
Apart from other good points mentioned in comments, there's also this thing that in free-fall scenario (h = how high you object is above the ground, v = velocity, Ek = kinetic energy),
v(h) ~ sqrt(h)
thus
Ek(h) ~ v^2 (h) ~ h
Which means, the higher something starts, the more it will hurt when it hits your head.
Police in Mesa County, Colorado received the first authorization ever for police to fly UAS. That was last year. Since then, a county in Florida received authorization. Police in Texas toyed with the idea, but decided it wasn't in the budget. So i know of precisely two police precincts with legal authorization. It's possible there's a couple others I haven't heard about, but the total number is still very small. Even the Utah Highway Patrol got slapped down by the FAA for flying without authorization.
"Sadly there is no reasonable path to doing this legally."
There is, and that's to get "everyone" to do it. I recall the recent HN-linked article [1], which called for a large number of people to demand a trial, rather than take a plea deal, because that would collapse the system. Or, if everyone carried a gun, openly, and without a permit, the government couldn't stop the practice because it wouldn't have the resources to disarm an entire, determined population. The same is true for these tiny flying machines. The main problem, though, is the expense, as it would be a lot easier for any given person to acquire a gun than to acquire one of these, but the principle is the same. That leads to the observation that the expense is there because of lack of innovation in the field, and said lack exists due to laws restricting the use of anything which could be built. The answer is to simply ignore the laws, while pursuing the best technical answers, such as, for example, applying the recently-developed techniques of self-assembly, from the creators of the Harvard Monolithic Bee [2], in an effort to drive down costs and democratize the process of construction and ownership of tiny copters, so that, in fact, pretty much everyone who wanted to could possess one.
This is the best line I've read all week: 'it took six months to persuade suspicious taqueria owners to switch to a salsa with lower magnetic permittivity'
(I know this is likely to be downvoted as being a joke comment but considering I don't believe the original site to be more than a funny joke I would expect upvotes for all funny comments)
To quote Chris Anderson, CEO of DIYdrones and Editor-in-chief at wired:
Did you know the word "gullible" isn't in the dictionary?
Sigh. Prepare for loads of credulous coverage, matching the wave of reporting on the Pirate Bay's stoned suggestion that "we're going to use, er....GPS drones!....to file-trade from the sky. With Raspberry Pi."
No, no... it's good to dream about the future. I suggest heading over to DIYdrones, grab some hardware, and help create the future rather than reading about "credulous" projects.
There are plenty of real efforts underway to use UAV's in a similar fashion -- for example, to deliver medications in disaster-stricken areas [1] and for building construction [2]. We all have very little time and attention. I simply suggest that we allocate it wisely.
Oh no, if anyone can make TacoCopters work, it's her. She got arrested for a TSA overreaction, not for a hoax.
I'm disappointed in how cynical you people are. We live in a magical world, with axolotls and honey badgers; can we not dare to dream in the TacoCopter?
Star's totally legit, definitely makes me update towards at least some tacos being delivered by drone, though I doubt there's intention to make this serious business.
I've been flying model airplanes, helicopters and other RC contraptions since I was 10 years old. Decades. I've flown, designed and built nearly everything out there, from pure (no motor) gliders to aerobatic planes, electric and turbine jets, helicopters and multi-copters --even an occasional RC blimp. One of my favorites are very high power-to-weight ratio 2 meter-ish gliders with thousands of watts of power. They go straight-up like a rocket and reach incredible speeds, well in excess of 100 miles per hour (youtube: F5B glider).
The preface is to say: I get it. I do it. I love it. And, I'll probably stay in this hobby forever. Having kids has a way to help with that.
Having said that, I also understand, in no uncertain terms, just how dangerous this stuff can be. I have seen many nasty accidents first hand. A small propeller spinning at 5K or 10K RPM can shred a hand or a face in horrific ways.
The idea of toy drones flying around town is a scary one. The FAA is right in wanting to exercise restraint and gradually walk into a sensible set of rules. The have been working very closely with the RC flight community in order to understand the needs and voice their concern as well:
I love the idea of small inexpensive drones coming online to help firefighting efforts, disaster aid and such needs. Still, it has to be done right and it has to be done with safety in mind.
Small inexpensive model aircraft, even when they cost thousands of dollars, are not designed to the same strict engineering standards of full-scale aircraft in general aviation. Most of these devices suffer from catastrophic single-point failures in their designs. None of them are put through strict process control during manufacturing to ensure that such mundane things as cracked or "cold" solder joints don't creep into a batch. None of them are made with conformal or environmental coatings applied to circuitry. Not one of them uses rugged, vibration and environmentally-tested hardware, boards, wiring, connectors and batteries.
As an example of this, a prominent motor controller manufacturer recently produced designs that started to violently catch on fire and even blow-up under varied conditions. They have been reported to catch fire by simply plugging in a battery or in the middle of a flight. In a lot of cases people have lost helicopters costing thousands of dollars to this particular problem. However, in most cases, because the activity took place within the confines of AMA model aircraft flying fields not one person seems to have been hurt and no property (other than the model and electronics) was damaged.
Did you know that the LiPo (Lithium Polymer) battery packs these models use can also spontaneously catch fire and explode? YouTube search: "LiPo fire"
It's exciting to think of these little things flying about and doing all kinds of things for us. The reality, I think, is as far away as building a C3PO that actually works as it does in the movie. OK, maybe not that far, but nowhere close to reality. The legal and liability hurdles alone are massive.
Can someone make a quadcopter that can safely and reliably fly around buildings in a city with an acceptably low probability of failure, redundancy and solid engineering? Sure. But it isn't going to be anything like these little toys we are seeing in hundreds upon hundreds of youtube demos.
I believe that, once the FAA has a chance to sort this out there will be really good opportunities for very high quality, professionally designed drones. It'll be a few years though. And rightly so.
Similar stuff could be said to Henry Ford about cars back in the early 1900s ("What? You want us to zip around town with a vehicle full of GASOLINE? Yeah right...").
This is a truly revolutionary idea, one that has so many different positive side-effects (reduce traffic congestion, reduce pollution, faster deliveries, cheaper mailing costs, etc). It needs to be pushed forward by visionaries, folks who really believe in it.
Yes, they'll have to be a little crazy. Yes, they'll likely have to deal with setbacks.
But if they persist and succeed, their name just might one day be written in history books.
Delivering tacos with RC helicopters is a revolutionary idea?
I believe you misspelled evolutionary. Inventing a helicopter was a revolutionary idea (pun!), and coming up with a delivery model for food consumption may have been a revolutionary idea, but combining the two definitely is not.
This is basically a sky lawnmower with a taco hanging below it. Seems kinda dangerous.
I'd sure like to know if those who are for this sort of thing have any experience building and flying these things. It's really easy to voice opinions from the outside. Armed with experience your opinion is sure to change. I don't think I know of anyone involved with RC as a hobby or even among my aerospace friends who would not cringe at the idea of having swarms of unsafe little drones flying around a city.
Once again, Mark Twain said it best: "He who holds a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way".
It's not just "not super safe". It's actively dangerous. These things can straight-up mangle a person - at least ones big enough to carry tacos. Guess what happens when a little kid or a dog sees an RC helicopter flying around or landing - they run to it.
So are roads, yet we build them near homes. Children are just going to have to learn not to touch spinning blades like they learn not to run into traffic. And dogs will be dogs, I suppose.
This is an exceptionally low standard. Are unmanned flying taco deliveries one millionth the benefit towards society that roads are?
There is also an entire industry based on keeping children safe from everyday dangers. We have baby gates, plugs for electric outlet, fences for yards, childproof medicine caps, cabinet lock, etc. Exactly how are you keeping your child safe from the swarm of helicopters delivering tacos en masse to the park he's playing in? Do kids need to walk around in protective bubbles because the need to avoid waiting in line at Chipotle outweighs the need for safety?
When I talked about making quadcopters to my friend, the first thing that popped into his head was something similar. He was thinking about making small weed delivery copters. that was actually a very good idea; not suggestible at all ofcourse.
Probably a joke since the batteries last around 15 minutes, especially when carrying a load.
It would be amazing if real though. Maybe someone can make a hydrocarbon powered version that would actually have enough range. It would use less fuel than a car, and get there faster to boot.
Something like a quadshot [0] should be more efficient for this task - use quadrotors for the VTOL ability, but convert to far more power-efficient wing for flying at speed.
I think it'd be possible to build a large quadshot-esque quadrotor -> flying wing device that would have the 1-3 mile range and ~500gr non-battery payload capacity necessary for taco delivery.
They definitely would. I saw this, and even though I know it coming to fruition is highly unlikely, my team and I would patronize them almost every day.
In the south of Spain it would be an impossible business. Once I get into a library to return a book, entering the library I saw a bicycle attached to the wall, when I went out of the library I saw the chain cut and the bicycle gone with some parts of it in the floor. It was shocking how fast everything went, it is like you look at something, then look away for a moment and then its gone.
In Spain gitanos will learn how to pilot UAVs (or "fish" them) in a blink of an eye.
I am always shocked by the fact that people equate a negative view of Roma/Gitanos with racism.
Disliking a parasitic culture that fosters the notion that it is okay to steal from "others" is not racism since it a) has nothing to do with race but culture, and b) it's based on fact, not prejudice.
how fast can a quadcopter fly, how far, and how much can it carry? seems like this would only work well in limited contexts, like, say, small deliveries on a particular campus or within a single large building or complex. not to be a complete nay-sayer, but the limits of battery tech are a bit harder to overcome than most software problems.
Last mile delivery will eventually be a huge market for UAVs. Think beyond just tacos -- think about anything that people would pay a premium for to have it delivered to them. Out of milk? No problem. Need your prescription filled? Delivered to your GPS coordinates. Condom delivery? FedEx?
The technology is there. The regulations need to catch up.
Oddly, the technical challenge of sending a ground robot through an unknown dynamic environment is even more difficult than a flying robot. There's very few obstacles in the sky. Another thing to consider is petty theft and vandalism. Maybe I'm jaded, but I think a ground robot would not last very long. With an aerial vehicle, packages can be dropped with parachutes. (though, I'm pretty sure some will be shot down before they're generally accepted)
The biggest issue I see is random hackers ordering a taco then putting a "TPB Transponder[1]" on several of these. The tacocopter then does double duty as an airborne server.
[1] Theoretical easy-to-deploy Android or Raspberry Pi-sized wifi-broadcasting device, to broadcast TPB magnet links.
Nice idea. Only one remark: Anyone has ever seen the dicrepancy between the concepts of new aircrafts and the things that actually fly? Aviation is one of the most conservative industries I know, and for a good reason considering the fact one accident kills probably hundreds of people at once. You can argue that some regulations are more on the red tape side, but most of them are here for good reason. If I were a start-up, I would rather follow these regulations or have really deep pockets AND official support if I dont't, like SpaceX for example.
That said, I'm not sure if it is for real or not... Funny idea having a flying delivery claptrap bringing you your tacos :-)
This will eventually happen, though. That means the FAA's going to have to come up with some pretty strict regulations to force manufacturers and operators to ensure their bots don't crash into things/people.
Imagine landing pads on the top of every house/city. They would look like giant targets used for this copters to land. There could be one within a few meters of where you currently are.
You place an order on your cell phone. The copters immediately go to work delivering whatever you needed. A SMS would alert you that your goods have arrived. Maybe there would be secure drop zones where a giant chute would automatically route your package into a secure locker. You would open the locker with your cell phone.
Finally a practical use of QR codes? Each landing pad could have some information embedded via QR to help the copter to distinguish them from one another.
Seems to me that QR codes are infinitely more useful to robots than humans. Forget addresses on mail, just QR codes (or the modern day equivalent) on everything that will be handled by robots.
Why think flat? I remember in an early demo of aerobatic drone maneuvering at Georgia Tech, they were able to get drones to land on Velcro surfaces, even at partially inverted angles. If they could do that precisely enough, you could have drones that never have to land, they just have to latch on to a power station.
AKA: Quadrocopters - Flying Robots Deliver Themselves To You!
With all the crazy scamming I've experienced on places like Craigslist, I can't imagine there wouldn't be some jerk that would just start taking the vehicles. Even if there's some type of visual/tracking, they'd figure it out. How many tacos would have to be delivered to deal with that kind of shrinkage?
Whoa! I was daydreaming about this exact same thing (Except it was pizza instead of tacos). I thought they should have a small box that hangs from them so they could drag the box down with a small thread in order to avoid accidents with the propellers. Anyway, awesome idea, hope to see this legally in the near future :-)
They attempted this in small form on 'Marcel's Quantum Kitchen' (its on Netflix) using a toy quadcoptor to 'deliver' a piece of pizza at a dinner party. Didn't really work out to well but interesting concept nonetheless.
Ok so, how could they protect a UAV from thieves? Anyone could jam the remote control signal or use a net to block it on the ground.They could add an effective gps based alarm and insure the drones,this is a real problem though, only while UAVs are still quite expensive imo
I've been planning to build a quad-rotor to deliver food and beverages around my house, but I never thought that idea could turn into a delivery startup.
I can't tell if this is a joke (?), but the technology is definitely available to make it happen.
This idea is currently illegal since FAA regulations restrict unmanned multirotor aircraft from any commercial activities, although they are in the process of changing these rules. So it might go from joke to reality :)
TacoCopter has really incentivize for me, a Taco-centric dietary pivot. It's advanced culinary airborne delivery agent is HUGELY disruptive. I can tell by the screams!
This sounds like sci-fi but I think we're not far from being able to do this. I think the entire Postal system could be replaced with UAV's. Why deliver mail by hand when robots would clearly be better and could work 24/7 and not go crazy. Food delivery maybe doesn't have the profit margins to do it yet, but eventually it will.
more info: http://photographyforrealestate.net/2012/01/24/warning-faa-s...