# Amazon to use quad copters to deliver packages



## ironpony (Dec 4, 2013)

Do not know how to link to it but Amazon is in the process of getting FAA approval to use quad copters to deliver packages to your door in less than 30 mins.
google it, interesting. I do not think it will ever work but...................
Cant believe no one else has posted this.


----------



## Seasoned Oak (Dec 4, 2013)

I can think of 1000 reasons why this may not be a roaring success. Some obvious ones and others like ,WIll these things have RADAR to keep then from crashing into each other and buildings ,trees, ect. One of the obvious questions is, at what $ cost will this happen. Might only be for those willing to pay $50 for delivery.


----------



## ironpony (Dec 4, 2013)

apparently they are spending millions to try and make it work


----------



## USMC80 (Dec 4, 2013)

I hear dominos pizza is looking into it as well


----------



## WarmBluthner (Dec 4, 2013)

They can drop logs right down the chimney!


----------



## ironpony (Dec 4, 2013)

up to five pounds from what I've read.


----------



## BrotherBart (Dec 4, 2013)

An advertising stunt the night before cyber Monday.


----------



## WarmBluthner (Dec 4, 2013)

Tomorrow it's Sinterklaas in Holland, seated on his white horse he throws parcels down the chimney. He'll be out of a job soon.


----------



## BrotherBart (Dec 4, 2013)

A 30 second ad on 60 Minutes costs something like a hundred grand. Amazon got a free fifteen minutes. Freakin brilliant.


----------



## fossil (Dec 4, 2013)

Meh...

http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/eats/drone-drops-beers-bombs-south-africa-article-1.1422617


----------



## Ashful (Dec 4, 2013)

BrotherBart said:


> A 30 second ad on 60 Minutes costs something like a hundred grand. Amazon got a free fifteen minutes. Freakin brilliant.


You nailed it.


----------



## webbie (Dec 4, 2013)

Traffic and income on my drone site doubled as soon as that PR came out!

Thanks, Amazon!


----------



## webbie (Dec 4, 2013)

Here is the present reality explained:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2069000/heres-why-amazon-drones-may-never-land-at-your-door.html

BUT, Amazon and others are futurists. I have little doubt they are studying it and putting some R&D into it. Why not? Of course there are obstacles, but many of them can be overcome eventually.


----------



## Seasoned Oak (Dec 4, 2013)

I agree with BB it was an advertising stunt. If it ever does happen it will be prohibitively  expensive.


----------



## Stax (Dec 4, 2013)

Webbie…the pcworld article is exactly where my mind went with the drone deliveries in the first place.  Where are these UAV's taking off from?  They'd half to have a fulfillment center in every city in every state.  Not gonna happen.


----------



## BrotherBart (Dec 4, 2013)

I like the PC article thing about landing. Ask any helicopter pilot about electric and telephone lines.


----------



## webbie (Dec 4, 2013)

Ah, all ye of little faith. That's why guys like Bezos and friends are billionaires...they think ahead

How about one of these with lots of smaller quads attached to it???
http://www.e-volo.com/

In the end, electric flight is fairly inexpensive. I can just imagine all you guys lamenting that it would be impossible that someday there would be paved roads and trucks to deliver packages to everyone within one day......



I want to be reincarnated just so I can watch all this stuff happen. Meanwhile, my book is becoming a best seller.......

Look at that! #4 in reference!
At this rate, I'll be able to retire and fly quadcopters all day long....


----------



## BrotherBart (Dec 4, 2013)

I know. I am a Luddite. Stuck making the small bucks for 40 years trying to make the crap the visionaries came up with actually work.


----------



## webbie (Dec 4, 2013)

How many of us would do what those German dudes are doing and invest millions in this stuff?

You have to have respect for people like that, IMHO. They bet the farm over and over again...


----------



## jharkin (Dec 5, 2013)

Yeah, this one has turned int oa couple of long running discussions on my favorite RC helicopter site.  

The talk is that it will be limited to packages under 5lb delivered within 5 miles of one of their hubs for prime members.

I can see this actually being cheaper than regular delivery long term when you consider how much it costs to operate delivery trucks and pay drivers.

The copters they will use will be nothing like the toys in the mall obviously.

I can see a lot of problems still - legal issues, how does the thing avoid collisions with other air trafic, your car, how does it know not to drop the box on your kids head, etc.  But I'm sure these are solvable issues.  If you saw an R/C helicopter from the 1990's and looked at a modern drone you wouldn't believe how the technology has evolved so far, just give it time...

Ideas like this make me think of bigger picture questions, like what to we do in 20 years when automation and AI means there just are not nearly enough to keep 7 billion people busy...  If any of you have ever read the Isaac Asimov "Robot" novels you will know what I mean


----------



## woodgeek (Dec 5, 2013)

Personally I think a network of pneumatic tubes will make the Bezos copters obsolete...I saw it in futurama.


----------



## BrotherBart (Dec 5, 2013)

woodgeek said:


> Personally I think a network of pneumatic tubes will make the Bezos copters obsolete...I saw it in futurama.



It used to work getting payments upstairs and the receipts back in Penny's and Sear's in the 50's 

Damn I'm old.


----------



## woodgeek (Dec 5, 2013)

Found a snapshot of you hard at it...


----------



## firefighterjake (Dec 6, 2013)

BrotherBart said:


> It used to work getting payments upstairs and the receipts back in Penny's and Sear's in the 50's
> 
> Damn I'm old.


 

Still in use in some hospitals . . . wife worked at a place where they shipped meds and other items via the tubes . . . and once in awhile they would clean off the nurses desk by sending the crap off to random locations via the tubes . . . and then there was that ice cream incident she told me about . . . I guess that didn't end quite as well.


----------



## Ashful (Dec 6, 2013)

jharkin said:


> Ideas like this make me think of bigger picture questions, like what to we do in 20 years when automation and AI means there just are not nearly enough to keep 7 billion people busy...  If any of you have ever read the Isaac Asimov "Robot" novels you will know what I mean


Not looking to make this political, but last I checked, robotics repair paid way more than delivery driver.  Programmer more than that, and automation engineer, even more.  There'll be lots of good jobs in manufacturing, programming, and maintaining those drones.

Close a door, open a window...


----------



## jharkin (Dec 6, 2013)

Joful said:


> Not looking to make this political, but last I checked, robotics repair paid way more than delivery driver.  Programmer more than that, and automation engineer, even more.  There'll be lots of good jobs in manufacturing, programming, and maintaining those drones.
> 
> Close a door, open a window...



I dont disagree... but my point is not about payscale... its about the number of jobs relative to the size of the population.  UPS has something like 100,000 drivers out on the roads and a similar number of trucks.  If we replace all the delivers with drones will you need 100,000 repairmen and  engineers?  probably only a fraction.  

Just like when we automated factories we replaces 100k's of assembly worker jobs with 1k jobs running the automation.


----------



## Seasoned Oak (Dec 6, 2013)

We are innovating ourselves out of work. THose laid off workers wont be buying a lot from anyone especially amazon.


----------



## webbie (Dec 6, 2013)

According to futurists, we all should be out enjoying the view and partying!

But, things turned out a bit different - the economic advantages of productivity did not flow to the people (in general)....

Sure, that's a political topic. But it's important to note that people should educate themselves in the useful trades and arts...there are not going to be too many highly paid factory or delivery jobs in the USA in future years. Some, yes, but not many.....

As to where the productivity gains end up, that's for the voters and activists of the future to decide. The die is pretty much cast for now.


----------



## webbie (Dec 6, 2013)

FYI, if you want some idea of the free PR that Amazon gained from this, here is a little chart of my drone site traffic - you can guess that the uptick was because of their PR story.....now it's going back down again! That was almost a doubling of our readership on the peak day.


----------



## Ashful (Dec 6, 2013)

webbie said:


> But, things turned out a bit different - the economic advantages of productivity did not flow to the people (in general)....


I dunno webbie... seems to me those advantages flow just fine toward the people willing to put themselves in a position to receive them.  Not to get too far off on a tangent, but I work with former kids of privilege, who went to art school at great expense, and now make $9/hour.  Likewise, I went to engineering school with kids who had to borrow and work their way thru school, and some now make more than I.  It's a choice, and the better road isn't always easy, but those who have done it against significant odds are proof that anyone can.  There will always be victims and victors, you just have to decide which role you want to play.


----------



## webbie (Dec 6, 2013)

Well, yeah, my point if you have to be very flexible and learn more than one trade or way to live. This is unlike the past and also unlike basic human behavior. Henry Ford quoted something in his book, which foretells all of this, about most (I think he said 95%) of people wanting to just work a good hard and productive day (given the proper chance and salary) and only 5% willing to advance. 

At the time and up until about 1960, this worked here and in many other places like Japan, where if you worked hard and showed up, you had a basic living. No more. Now you have to do much much more.

One of the things about innovation and entrepreneurship is....well, like blogging or starting an internet forum! That is, if everyone did it, it would not be the same. If everyone blogged, there would be no one to read it. If everyone acted as those 5%, then they wouldn't be that 5%....

Anyway, don't want to get too far off course - but it's a fair statement to say our future societies will have to deal with a situation where automation and robotics do away with a lot of repetitive work...and that, as of yet, I feel that we have not adapted to this....causing some misery. Let's watch over the next decade or two and see what happens!


----------



## Ashful (Dec 6, 2013)

webbie said:


> Well, yeah, my point if you have to be very flexible and learn more than one trade or way to live. This is unlike the past...


Agreed on all points, webbie!


----------



## shmodaddy (Dec 6, 2013)




----------



## begreen (Dec 9, 2013)

Pure dreaming, it's not gonna happen.


----------



## webbie (Dec 9, 2013)

begreen said:


> Pure dreaming, it's not gonna happen.



If you were a betting man I'd take you up on that with a 10 year window........


----------



## Ashful (Dec 9, 2013)

begreen said:


> Pure dreaming, it's not gonna happen.


Someone was once ridiculed for suggesting that men would one day fly thru the sky in horseless carriages.


----------



## begreen (Dec 9, 2013)

There are too many issues to resolve like apartment deliveries, theft, power lines, FAA regs, range, abuse (think terrorists here), privacy concerns, weather issues, inability to press a door bell button, guard dogs, etc.  There may end up being some niche delivery opportunities like aid  for some remote areas, but I don't see this happening large scale in an urban environment.


----------



## Ehouse (Dec 9, 2013)

BrotherBart said:


> It used to work getting payments upstairs and the receipts back in Penny's and Sear's in the 50's
> 
> Damn I'm old.




We're about the same age (I'm not old, However) but our Penny's had an overhead system of cables.  Each department station had a pull chain which when yanked, sent a canister with the cash etc. up to the balcony for processing.  The canister with receipt returned to the station by gravity.  A good model for inner city transport in MHO.


----------



## fossil (Dec 9, 2013)

Amazon drone delivery.  Completely feasible.  Completely impracticable.  Completely hype.


----------



## jharkin (Dec 9, 2013)

There was an editorial on this in the Boston Globe this weekend. Apparently there is a Pizza chain in the UK that uses drones to deliver Pies and in South Africa they use them to deliver beer to spectators in Sports stadiums (who can order via their iphones).  Seems that its coming....


----------



## begreen (Dec 9, 2013)

The beer delivery was a one shot (or cup) experience and not without a lot of problems. Not sure about the UK pizzas, but hope it's not rainy and windy (never happen right?).


----------



## BrotherBart (Dec 9, 2013)

Bezos needs to try the concept delivering the newspapers for the Washington Post, which he just bought, first.


----------



## begreen (Dec 14, 2013)

I Amazon starts delivering booze (or pot) in the future, piracy is going to get a lot more interesting.


----------

