I've an efficiency fantasy of them piggybacking on the roofs of trucks going in the right direction in order to save fuel, then hopping off when the truck starts to head in a different direction. Techno parasitism.
This is actually how (some) couriers worked in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. They latched on to the back of passing cars/trucks with magnetic harpoons and hitched a free ride until they needed to head another way.
You should, it's a great book. Published before Stephenson became (apparently) famous enough to ignore his editors and stopped cutting down his material... Both "Snowcrash" and "Diamond Age" are very good.
There's going to be some problematic airflow around vehicles like this. The air behind and to the sides will be turbulent, I'm not sure a drone could safely approach a truck this closely. It might require more powerful motors.
A truck on the freeway could be even harder, a drone would need to hold 55mph, throw in a headwind of say 15mph and you'll need a 70mph drone. Even on a highway at 40 + 15mph you're looking at 55mph in an environment with overhead lines, other vehicles, people.
Takeoff would be harder still, once the drone is released from a truck then it's instantly doing 55mph, or more if there is a tailwind. Should there be a failure during this mavouvre, there's no safety mechanism: the drone would become a 55mph+ projectile heading straight towards the following car's windshield.
Why would you do that? Then the truck would have bad aerodynamics all the time just in case a third party drone wanted to hitch a ride some of the time. If you're going to start using trucks in bulk to transport drones intentionally, then you can probably come up with much better designs.
> If you're going to start using trucks in bulk to transport drones intentionally, then you can probably come up with much better designs.
Indeed. I believe the design is called "trucks" ;-)
One could of course have stackable drones and fit them in an open lorry, and program the route, order the drones so that the could take off in sequence... I'm not sure it'd be worth it though. I could definitively see fleets of "drone hangar lorries" driving around, slowing down to let drones off with deliveries, and taking on returning drones. I suppose you could set up a couple of circuits in big cities, guaranteeing a flightpath of, say no more than n kilometres from any one address to the nearest circuit -- and the drones might hop from circuit to circuit -- possibly even with a charge-station in the lorries.
Or change the lorries with purpose-build/modded electrical trains... (and fill in dead-zones with electrical trolleybuses).
Come to think of it, fitting trolleybuses with a "roof hangar" and charging station might be best: they typically don't go very fast -- and even if they do, they regularly stop to take on/let off passengers. Sounds like a good match.
That would actually cause a net increase of fuel consumption. The drag on the truck would offset the drone's saving. Overpass clearance could also be problematic.
The net result would be lawsuits and damaged drones I'm afraid. At least until a drone operator enters into an agreement with a hauling company.
I don't think the increase would be that significant, after all you're adding a few kilos to a multi-ton vehicle. But I can see another solution: imagine that the company allows people (not only truckers, but even ordinary car drivers) to lease a roof-mounted drone docking station in exchange for free shipping of all ordered items and/or some meaningful discounts. This would easily offset additional fuel costs, create an incentive for a part of the population to participate in the program, and the dedicated roof station could have some guidance hardware that would help the drone land, as well as a charging station that would let the drone recharge from car's alternator. Seems like a win for everyone, though not very much in a hacker spirit. I'd love to see drones just hitching a ride.
Except that it might be the last thing you'd see, before the drone fails and comes crashing through your windshield. Seriously though, if you're in the car behind a drone trying to land on a car ahead when it fails, there's no failsafe.
I think the net change in fuel consumption would be largely dependent on a lot of factors - but mostly on the speed of the truck. Since rolling friction tends to dominate at lower speeds, and a quadcopter expends a lot of energy to stay afloat, then it's likely that for most truck - quadcopter configuration, there exists a critical speed where net fuel (or energy) consumption flips over. My wildass guess is that for most configurations, it would be somewhere above residential speeds (~40km/h), but far below highway speeds (~100km/h).
I've seen the figures on the aerodynamic roof air deflectors they put on semi-trailers and they can get as much as ~8-10% fuel saving at highway speed (ideal size/fit) where the aerodynamic drag is dominant.
Semis average around 6.5 mpg these days (flat, highway) so a 10% saving is close to 1 gph of diesel fuel or about 2.80-3.00$/h.
So I'd guess drones would add about 1-1.50$/h in fuel cost or so when they latch on. Enough to be noticeable.
The shields would themselves increase both drag and weight. It's probably very challenging to land on the back of a truck due to the airflow around the truck, it would require a drone which can withstand high winds, turbulent air, and has much more powerful motors to perform the mavouvre. That would increase the weight of the drone significantly, so you're unlikely to see energy savings.
So the drones take off and land from a purpose-built shielded dock/recharger station only when the truck is at a stop light or designated real-time-determined rendezvous where the truck and the drone(s) have agreed to meet or un-meet while the truck is stopped.
And fuel consumption concerns are negligible. Sure, there likely would be a net increase in fuel used, but the premium is on drone electric charge capacity, battery weight, and drone range. A coordinated network of drones hopping onto trucks would greatly increase total per-drone range and make it possible to centralize drone freight depots even more (making them more sparsely distributed). This would push down costs a lot. The drone actually flies only "the last mile" and delivers only higher-valued goods.
That's much more reasonable, landing on a stationary truck is obviously going to be straightforward and safe. It's still probably best to do it away from major roads though.
The fuel was never an issue, sure there's a net increase in fuel consumed but not a net increase in energy as the drone is less efficient than the truck at transporting the same load.
A "last mile" drone is a pretty good idea, not just because it increases range, but because it avoids the need for the for the drone to return to the depot after each delivery. On the other hand, if the deliveries are tightly clustered it might sill be more efficient to just deliver them using the truck, as drones waste a lot of energy working against gravity.
> That's much more reasonable, landing on a stationary truck is obviously going to be straightforward and safe. It's still probably best to do it away from major roads though.
Well, even crossing a highway with a large number of drones, is bound to lead to some of them failing and falling down into traffic? I suppose in some way there's some safety margin, having the drone do a controlled crash as soon as one engine fails -- but there must be scenarios in which the (presumably rather cheap) devices suffer sudden failure (eg: battery pack failure?).
That suggests to me that we might get better gains with purpose-built drone trucks (think "aircraft carrier") rather than leveraging existing (e.g. UPS) trucks.
I also wonder whether delivery trucks are in and of themselves as prevalent in China as they are in America, versus, say, bicycle carriers or other forms of delivery.
Not to be a downer, but I think the whole drone delivery thing, at least for now, nothing but a media show. Worked great for Amazon, .... (Maybe the technology will evolve enough later to be cost effective, and tests are important on that path.)
It's already happening. Imagine delivery of high-value, light goods to remote locations, e.g. medicines in the Australian Outback, or island off the German coast. These are examples of what has already been done.
Or imagine delivery of low-value goods to close locations.
At the moment it takes 30-60 minutes for a restaurant from 3 block away to deliver my lunch and it includes a bicycle, a delivery guy, an elevator guy and a couple of doors and/or doorbells. It costs a few dollars in tip.
A drone can bypass all of that inefficiency and show up in my window 60 seconds after the meal is cooked. In New York it could deliver to the fire escape or to a special landing pads, or just hover in front of the 3rd window on the left on the 5th floor for 30 seconds.
What happens to the illegal delivery guy living on the tip is an entirely different question.
That's the one case I can't imagine working any time soon - drones in the cities. To-door delivery is a fine dream when you live in a suburb and have your own garden, but in a city? What they're going to do with that pizza? Throw it through the window (if they even knew the right one)? Land on a roof and risk someone else snatching the cargo?
Not saying it's impossible, but I see tons of additional concerns, both practical and related to safety.
Snatching would probably not be an issue. (Delivery guy would also give the "cargo" to anyone who claims he ordered it).
They also don't have to throw it though the window. You know to the second when the drone arrives and it can just hover until you open the window and take it. And it's your window, not someone elses. After 2 minutes, your lunch goes back and you got a bad point on your profile.
You would need to order to the right window and stuff, but you can build a window map of the city with drones. I think the hard part is regulation and licensing the airspace, not the technology.
I think flying within centimeter distance of a building could present some additional technical and safety challenge (wind, avoiding people getting their fingers sawed off by rotor blades), but the legal hurdles will the biggest problem, I think.
There is little safe space to fly over in cities - you can't just start flying over roads and pavements, because if any malfunction happens, you'll be dropping a 10kg high-velocity brick at people and cars. You'll need at least specialized insurance for that, and I'm not sure if anyone gives this kind of thing.
Cities have plenty of safe places to fly (over streets for instance; or over roofs) but the final contact issue is real. How about: don't come down until signaled by a smartphone, then home in on the gps location.
Over streets is one of the least safe place to fly - imagine a 10km brick falling at 40km/h into incoming traffic or a group of pedestrians. As for the final contact, your average quadcopter will have like 10-20 minutes of flight time tops; it can't just wait for you to signal it - being even a minute late could mean the drone won't make it back to a charging station.
On the stealing the drone issue:
I don't think cooperation is an issue here. It's like worrying about someone beating an Uber driver and taking his car.
Beating a driver is much different than stealing a machine. Assaulting a person uleashes a whole new set of laws on your arse. Think instead of bike thefts - too cheap for society to care about, so they keep getting stolen all the time.
Americans refer to people who live in the USA without government permission as "illegals". These people often take low paid work, such as pizza delivery.
I'd be willing to bet we see self driving "moped/scooter" deliveries before self driving car deliveries simply because of the physics / liability implications. If reliable car systems can be developed, scaling down makes a lot of sense. Economically, it would be much easier to insure a moped than a car/truck, IMO.
How does the delivery get from the moped on the street to my front door on the 5th floor? Maybe a Segway type thing would work better, it just needs to be able to press the lift buttons.
I'm still not convinced by delivery by drone. There's many problems that have yet to be solved, some have obvious solutions that are still none trivial to implement - others at least in my mind are very much an issue.
So far as none trivial but solvable problems - there's going to have to be communication with all vendors operating delivery drones. Each drone will have to be aware of other drones by other companies and their flight-paths in the area and avoid collisions.
The biggest problem that I can see is the customer and public themselves. What is to stop someone stealing drones? Or plain vandalism of them? Follow it in a car to it's destination and you know it's going to have to come low enough down for a quick grab. Otherwise if there's some controlled drop off point, air rifles or crossbows or other publicly available small projectile weapons.
Haha I remember that southpark episode. I think relying on cameras and law to stop vandalism and theft is a little naive though. Perhaps you've never owned a motorbike but being an owner of one I can tell you it happens much more often than you'd think. If there's money to be made or 'fun' to be had there's a low life doing or considering how to do it.
Also, motorbikes may not be stolen that often, but plain bikes are. No camera and no law helps here, because it's treated as a low-public-harm crime and the police doesn't even really bother fighting it. One could argue that stealing drone pizza deliveries could end up like that, at least initially.
Considering that this might be due to needing a key to start the motorbike, makes me wonder why there aren't 'bike locks' that stop the pedals / wheels /handlebars from turning at all without a key.
I guess someone could literally carry it away though, which is a separate issue.
That's what usually happens. They saw off the lock, and if for some reason they can't (too strong, too much effort, not enough time, etc.) they sometimes just unscrew the locked wheel and take the rest. That's why where I live, locking a bike by its wheel is considered a very bad idea.
That's going to be one seriously dedicated pizza thief. Anyone dumb enough to go near an armed drone big enough to lift a pizza is going to end up in the emergency room.
> I'm still not convinced by delivery by drone. There's many problems that have yet to be solved
Of course - that's why we try things that have never been done before. It might work really well, or it might fail spectacularly. In both cases the important thing is we learn a ton for the next time we try something we've never done before.
It's important we keep trying to do things we've never done before.
Everything is relative. If the salaries are 1/4 what they are in the US (as an example), then the cost of pizza will be relatively the same too. The percentage of that pizza that goes towards paying for the delivery is pretty much the same.
The vast majority of the Chinese population with meaningful consumption power live in hire rise apartment buildings in the cities. So if you can't drop the package in a yard, how do you deliver by drone?
I wonder if China's more lax regulations aren't a big win for Alibaba and improves their ability to go to market faster than Amazon will with drove delivery.
They have more lax regulations about some things, but apparently civil aviation is extremely tightly regulated, with most of the country set aside for military aviation (James Fallows has written about this). I'm sure they'd be wary of all their civilians runnings drones, filming things that shouldn't be seen, etc as well.
How is the communist regime's governance in China "lax?" There's probably significant worry on the part of the CCP to keep drones controlled as they may see and record things that are politically inconvenient for this autocratic regime like political prisoners being abused or heavy-handed riot police action.
Chinese aerospace laws, from a casual googling, seem to be very strict as well, and geared towards favoritism for their military.
If drones take off anywhere, I imagine it will be in the most transparent countries, like the ultra-liberal Scandinavian democracies. I doubt drones are autocrat friendly for obvious reasons. I also imagine there's a nice middle ground between planes and rc hobbyists with defined paths and lots of rules that will eventually shake-out in many countries. Drone delivery just makes a lot of sense ,perhaps not so much with toothpaste, but with, say blood or organ delivery where a proper helicopter costs many times more and an accident is lethal. A drone accident is just a lost resource.
Chinese airspace is highly regulated, especially in the cities mentioned. Theoretically, every single drone flight has to be reported and registered with multiple military and civil agencies.
The drone in this stunt is operated by YuanTong, a parcel delivery company, not Alibaba. Also Alibaba does not (generally?) maintain distribution centers or hold inventory. So from a strategic perspective drones don't mean to Alibaba what they could to Amazon.
You are right, Alibaba doesn't even sell anything, they are like e-bay, just connect the buyer to the seller. As far as I know Alibaba also doesn't have a delivery service, ShungFeng Express is the most used delivery company. The chinese Amazon is YiHaoDian(360buy), they sell their own things and they have their own delivery operation.
Whenever I see drone delivery, I always see quadrocopters. Aren't octocopters more safe (they can still fly with 7 rotors)? Intuitively they can also carry more load. It should be a very simple decision considering that the main objection against drones is safety.
It's definitely an issue, especially with payloads, but it's feasible to work around it. I think you can keep strapping on batteries for quite a while, too--the lift of some of these machines is incredible.
Quads are an MVP in this sense-- I imagine commercial fleets of any type will be primarily 8 or 16 rotor machines.
With just 4 rotors you are pretty much toast if any single component fails, with a well built and properly programmed 16 rotor craft you could theoretically stay up, or at least do a somewhat controlled landing on just 4, assuming opposing pairs.
It's......really weird. Solving a problem that doesn't exist. Tea? Really? Asian cultures as so different and seem weird to me with this kind of technology related announcements.
Are they using auto pilot or stick and yoke? Just curious, as the article mentions in the conclusion this isn't addressed. Recent regional news would indicate this may be a valid concern...well, at least from a cold-blooded investor standpoint (liability vs. profitability).
Great question, fundamental really. If it's auto pilot what's to stop some malicious hacker from diverting the drones. If it's manual how much are the pilots getting paid and are they bonded? Seems like a huge can of worms to me.
Yeah, while normal aircraft seem to have plenty of regulations and training involved, the nature of the 'piloting' is of worthwhile concern. As was just the case over in Washington DC, even a weather event can have drastically unwanted consequences. It's one thing to say "Oops I crashed my drone on the White House lawn" and quite different when it comes to "Oops I crashed your X/Y/Z product into a group of children playing outside."
My guess is that they are using human operators, and they probably have a retrieval squad on standby in case they lose contact. The regulatory issues I couldn't begin to guess.
The goal at this stage would be to validate the business model and to collect flight data and get a sense of the operational requirements. If it works and they want to develop an autopilot, they will then have all the flight data, landing zone choices and issues, and trained operators to consult.
Nicely put; especially with respect to the business model. It almost seems that being competitive with traditional methods (bicycle, scooter, truck) almost will require more investment than can be expected as a return on capital. If human capital is very cheap in the markets for delivery (assumption) then establishing a break-even / profit point is genuinely of concern.
Also, I can't help but recall seeing pictures of some cities with smog so bad I wonder if drone pilots would even be able to see at certain altitudes. Limited scenario, I know, but seems to correspond with population density. Dense population seems kind of the ideal market, so, yeah, just a thought.
Most likely GPS autopilot with FPV human backup in case something goes wrong. And I'm sure they will have crashes sooner or later if they start doing this at scale
Honestly I have doubts that the crashes-to-success ratio will be positive from the outset, or even overall. Seems like a reasonable "prove it" kind of attitude. Capable of it? No doubt...but what-goes-up-must-come-down as intended is a consistently difficult challenge.
Flying from known point A to known Landing Zone B via Multi-Rotor is actually a relatively routine task given current tech as you can buy a 3DR Iris for ~$750 and it will (relatively) reliably do just that. However add in unknown landing zone conditions and things get tricky.
How big is Alibaba inside China? Just like Amazon in the USA, the go-to place for people to buy stuff online? Disclaimer: I live in Brazil, and I use Alibaba only to buy inexpensive stuff, so that's the picture I have of the company.
Alibaba is like MercadoLivre, they don't sell anything. They pretty dominant, in China they have TaoBao, an e-bay like, TianMao, also like e-bay, but more selected, more expensive to open a shop in it, and more brand-oriented than TaoBao, and finally they have Alibaba China, that is a B2B site, it means real wholesale. Oh, there is also Alipay, huge, it is the Paypal in China, people here use it even to pay 10 bucks to a friend when sharing a restaurant bill, a guy just taps his mobile phone and send the 10 bucks to his friend that is sitting just across from him, it's funny. There is also Alimama, advertising market. The thing is that in Brazil (I'm a brazilian too!) the e-commerce is still far from the level it has reached in China. My wife (chinese) buys everything in the internet, even noodles, milk, oil, soap,her clothes, her Lenovo laptop, her Iphone6, everything from the internet. She can't spent a day without buying at least a pair of socks from the internet. Brazil lacked a good payment system, but now with PagSeguro i guess things will improve. But there is also the expensive delivery in Brazil, in China it's ridiculously cheap, like you pay 30 Reais to send a 5 kilos pack 2000 Kilometer away to the other side of the country within 24 hours!!
I wonder what is the difference in efficiency between drone delivery and the old-fashioned truck logistics, taking into account speed, carbon emissions, human factor etc – I wouldn't be surprised if 5x or 10x is the factor.
I wonder how often this happens for companies, where a PR stunt or vaporware press release from company A convinces company B to expend resources to "beat them to market".
That's how we got StarCraft, and thus modern RTS games. Someone created a fake rendered demo at E3 conference and Blizzard fell for the trick; they believed the awesome thing they saw is real, and they worked their butts off to beat it.
Got any citations on that? Warcraft, Dune II, etc. all came out way before Starcraft, and I'm pretty sure Blizzard was building SC pretty quick on the heels of WC2.
I think it was a Gamasutra article, but I remember that it wasn't so much that they made Starcraft because of the demo, but rather that they made it a lot better after seeing this fake demo.
Not Gamasutra, it came directly from one of StarCraft's developers blog. Per [0], StarCraft was supposed to be the "Warcraft in Space" it didn't turn out to be, and it was meant as a quick project to fill the publishing gap. [1] Explains the fake demo thing and its influence on StarCraft development in lenghth.
A key quote:
"At some point I talked with Mark and Patrick about how Dominion Storm knocked us on our heels, and they let us in on Ion Storm’s dirty little secret: the entire demo was a pre-rendered movie, and the people who showed the “demo” were just pretending to play the game! It would be an understatement to say that we were gobsmacked; we had been duped into a rebooting StarCraft, which ultimately led it to be considered “the defining game of its genre. It is the standard by which all real-time strategy games are judged” (GameSpot)."
One inevitable business area is in anti-drone system, particularly in drone-capture systems (e.g. intercept and actually "capture" the drone and its cargo for forensics, etc). If you made such a system right now, you'd immediately have orders from the White House, other high security locations, and eventually the wealthy, etc.
And of course, stealing from delivery drones is going to become a thing.
