Commercial drones: Opinions?

[Drunkrobot]

In the day and age we live in do you not think there is a chance an over zealous cop might make a mistake and open fire?

How many developed countries (the sort of countries likely to get these drones first) have such an unprofessional police service that officers using them for clay-pigeon shooting would be a daily occurrence? In my country, at least, standard officers don't even have guns on patrol, so this problem won't even happen here.

[PakledHostage]

@Macca82: So what's your point, and what do overzealous cops have to do with UAVs?

That delivery drones will get vandalized, intercepted and stolen is as certain as the fact that people write viruses and hack computer networks. Both types of actions are destructive and uncivilized, but that doesn't stop one type from happening. Why should the other be any different? There will inevitably be "cred" in certain circles for successfully interfering with a drone in one way or another. On the other hand, the argument that stealing from a drone is no different than stealing from a postal worker or delivery person doesn't hold water. I can't imagine there is a lot of "cred" in any community for holding up a delivery person.

[ZedNova]

Guys, most cities have laws stating that you cannot use any firearm in the city limits. I don't think shooting them down will be a problem unless some nut has a suppressor for his rifle or something. You're forgetting how loud they really are, and how hard it really is to shoot down a moving target with a single bullet.

The weather will be more of a problem than that.

[PakledHostage]

Guys, most cities have laws stating that you cannot use any firearm in the city limits.

There are laws against hacking computer networks too. It doesn't stop it from happening. A person putting down their banjo to take a potshot at a passing drone would be about the equivalent of a script kiddie hack, but more sophisticated attacks will certainly happen precisely because they are hard to pull off. As I said above, that challenge will inevitably be enough to encourage the behavior.

[Nibb31]

There are laws against hacking computer networks too. It doesn't stop it from happening. A person putting down their banjo to take a potshot at a passing drone would be about the equivalent of a script kiddie hack, but more sophisticated attacks will certainly happen precisely because they are hard to pull off. As I said above, that challenge will inevitably be enough to encourage the behavior.

Plus the potential reward of getting a free PlayStation or smartphone...

[ZedNova]

There are laws against hacking computer networks too. It doesn't stop it from happening. A person putting down their banjo to take a potshot at a passing drone would be about the equivalent of a script kiddie hack, but more sophisticated attacks will certainly happen precisely because they are hard to pull off. As I said above, that challenge will inevitably be enough to encourage the behavior.

Not really, if a gun goes off in a city everyone knows it. It's not the same as computer hacking. my father got fined for killing a possum with his M1 carbine on our back lawn when i was young, and we lived in a redneck 'town' with ~60 people in it. I doubt there will be a large amount of people risking going to jail just for a package that probably isn't what you want. Plus there's the risk of damaging it from the fall and bullet even if it is what you want.

People that are crazy enough to steal them will most likely not be shooting them.

[Winter Man]

To be perfectly honest, I'm not above letting off a small localised EMP or net gunning a drone for free pizza.

[jwenting]

hmm, harpoon gun with a compressed air charge? Pretty much silent, and can attach the line to a hoist to pull in the catch

[K^2]

There are laws against hacking computer networks too. It doesn't stop it from happening. A person putting down their banjo to take a potshot at a passing drone would be about the equivalent of a script kiddie hack, but more sophisticated attacks will certainly happen precisely because they are hard to pull off. As I said above, that challenge will inevitably be enough to encourage the behavior.

We've had a 152 come back with holes in the wings. Some redneck was bothered by them practicing slow turns over his farm. So yeah, I'm sure it will happen. But I don't think it will happen often enough to be a problem. Credit card fraud is also a thing, and I'm sure a few decades ago somebody thought it was a rock solid argument that there is now way credit cards will become popular.

[DaveofDefeat]

And just to put it out there, as a gun owner, shooting into the air is a dangerous thing to do and you shouldn't try it.

[PakledHostage]

Credit card fraud is also a thing, and I'm sure a few decades ago somebody thought it was a rock solid argument that there is now way credit cards will become popular.

For the record, I never said that delivery drones wouldn't happen. I just said they won't be in widespread use any time soon. And not because of theft, but because of the regulatory compliance issues and lack of maturity of the technology.

I was only pointing out that saying thefts from delivery drones won't happen because shooting into the air is dangerous and illegal isn't a very good argument. Neither, really, is the credit card argument. Stealing an old lady's credit card at gunpoint is one thing. Installing a credit card RFID tag reader in a subway turnstile to charge everyone who passes by $0.25 is quite another. More sophisticated and less sophisticated thefts happen to credit card users, just as more sophisticated and less sophisticated thefts from delivery drones will happen if they are ever implemented.

Edited December 17, 2013 by PakledHostage
Clarified a sentence.

[K^2]

I just said they won't be in widespread use any time soon. And not because of theft, but because of the regulatory compliance issues and lack of maturity of the technology.

Mode C transponder is required within 30nm of Class B airport, which is going to be majority of places where drone delivery is practical. Id est, large cities. So traffic avoidance isn't a problem. FAA regs are already pretty drone-friendly, and are getting improved. For short hauls, drones are already fairly efficient, so this can be economical. I don't see any regulation or tech issues.

The only obstacle is lack of infrastructure, which is something that's going to get built. This isn't a matter of decades. It's a matter of years.

[Kilmeister]

Another obstacle that hasn't really been addressed is personal injury liability. This is proposing to put autonomous machines with spinning blades near children and pets. In the video(Amazon Air), the propellers didn't appear to be shrouded, which could probably be fixed with a shrouds and screens without too much of a hinderance to it's flight properties. But even still, what happens when Fido attacks it or Junior sticks his finger into blades?

Edited December 17, 2013 by Kilmeister
clarity

[PakledHostage]

Mode C transponder is required within 30nm of Class B airport, which is going to be majority of places where drone delivery is practical. Id est, large cities. So traffic avoidance isn't a problem. FAA regs are already pretty drone-friendly, and are getting improved.

Great, I think we are in agreement that commercial drones will be implemented, we seem to differ only on the time frame. The current FAA regulations allow unmanned aerial systems (drones) to be operated by public agencies such as law enforcement, wildlife management agencies, etc. Certification and operation of commercial UAVs over urban centres still hasn't been addressed in the regulations. And while Mode-C does exist and is fully implemented in some areas, the transponders and associated TCAS systems are extremely expensive when compared to the cost of an electric quadcopter such as those that have been shown in Amazon's PR. Those systems only represent a portion of the cost, too. The cost of building delivery drones that meet the certification requirements and the cost of meeting the operating regulations will certainly impact the business case. As a pilot yourself, you should know the impact of aviation regulations on your costs all too well.

[K^2]

My point about transponder was that every other aircraft in the zone of operation is already going to carry one. So we can get good information about everything in the air from a radar. Obviously, only at certain altitude, but civilian traffic bellow that altitude should be restricted to takeoffs and landings, anyways. So we do have a way to manage drone traffic. Rest of avoidance can be done with vis-rec and a low power radar. It's not trivial, but still way simpler than Google car.

And I'm not talking about the kind of octocopter Amazon used for their PR stunt. These things just don't have the range. The only civilian use of copter drones I've seen is camera drones for news agencies. A local news agency was using one to make establishing shots at my campus. These things are great for that. I'm sure this will be a common thing before we know it. But they aren't for carrying stuff.

We are talking about a far more expensive machine. Yes, it will have to have a transponder, decent avionics, an entire boatload of sensors, much larger motors and batteries, lifting body that will allow it to go from hover to a cruising flight, and lots of other navigation and safety aids. We are talking about tens of thousands of dollars here. But that's your typical cost of a delivery van. Naturally, a van will deliver more stuff per day, but not by a huge enough margin to make this commercially nonviable. Especially if we can reduce human workload.

You'd have to be in position to charge a nice premium, so there has to be a great convenience factor. Not just a novelty one. For mail order, it's unlikely that you'll have a warehouse in a hop's range with stuff you need right now. And anything that has to be transported from a remote location would make drone on final leg pointless. General idea is right with pizza delivery. But the cheap-o drones will break someone's window or worse, and people who order pizza generally aren't the people who will waste money on a delivery by something sophisticated enough not to be a liability.

If we are talking realistically about a business making use of a drone for deliveries with a goal of making money on deliveries, and not just for advertisement, I'm going to go with an expensive restaurant. Large city, big wealth distribution gap, lots of value on showing off in higher circles, and not much in ways of regulations that can't be fixed with bribes. My top three picks for the first place with real operating drone delivery service would be Dubai, Moscow, and Shanghai. I'm actually a little surprised that it hasn't happened yet.

In US it will take just a bit longer. As you've said, there are some regulation hick-ups to still sort. They are being discussed, but so has been switching to metric altitudes for the past couple of decades. They'll probably make it work once there is economic pressure, but it really needs to pick up in the rest of the world first. Then we can shame FAA into fastballing it with the whole, "birthplace of aviation," thing. And US population tends to be way more thrifty with their spending. So the cost of operating drone delivery needs to come down a bit. But the technology's there, infrastructure is there, and the interest is there. It's going to happen sooner than you expect.

[Tommygun]

I had a disturbing thought about these things.

You know advertisers at some point will want to use these delivery drones or their own drones for product placement.

At first just simple LED boards like the Goodyear blimp has that scroll a message across it as it flies by.

[ZedNova]

I had a disturbing thought about these things.

You know advertisers at some point will want to use these delivery drones or their own drones for product placement.

At first just simple LED boards like the Goodyear blimp has that scroll a message across it as it flies by.

And then eventually they'll just use mother drones, which are the size of a school bus and launch a 100 little drones to deliver packages. And they'll place stickers on the packages like "This package delivery was made possible by [insert company name here]".

[Skyler4856]

Yeah this seems darkly orwellian

[The Jedi Master]

Amazon does not plan to use parachutes. The books will just drop straight from the sky.

One free internet if you realize the problem here.

[PakledHostage]

One free internet if you realize the problem here.

[shrugs] Iuhno? Some may be inclined to believe that the book was handed down from on high?

[Camacha]

I have been thinking about this for a bit and I think it would actually be pretty cool to build a hunter drone. Not to capture Amazon packages (of course)*, but the technical challenges are not trivial and neat to solve as a challenge. Pretty quickly you run into typical hunter versus prey problems, such as the hunter needing to be bigger (should carry itself plus the captured craft), but also more powerful, faster and preferably more agile. That combination is hard to do, it is probable that you will need to pick a couple of those and leave the rest - just like you see in nature. Prey often escapes its more powerful predator by outmanoeuvring it (think seal versus white shark or cheetah versus springbok).

Tracking is another major challenge. Although it helps that the target drone is up high and alone, you will still need some relatively advanced technology to do it accurately and quickly enough to be effective. Optical tracking might be a good start, with some additional heat or sonic sensing. Those are all fairly limited in range, so how the actual target would be found I am not sure. Maybe by picking up radio or electronic signals.

Finally, for non-destructive capture a good strategy needs to be developed. Locking into the target reliably and making sure it does not interfere with your own aerial operation is not easily achieved without damaging the target craft too much.

I actually did air-to-air docking in KSP, but I guess this ups the difficulty another couple of levels

*I would strongly advise anyone not to interfere with commercial delivery drones. It will most probably carry a hefty penalty and is of course morally questionable.

Edited December 18, 2013 by Camacha

[Guest Brody_Peffley]

I have been thinking about this for a bit and I think it would actually be pretty cool to build a hunter drone. Not to capture Amazon packages (of course)*, but the technical challenges are not trivial and neat to solve as a challenge. Pretty quickly you run into typical hunter versus prey problems, such as the hunter needing to be bigger (should carry itself plus the captured craft), but also more powerful, faster and preferably more agile. That combination is hard to do, it is probable that you will need to pick a couple of those and leave the rest - just like you see in nature. Prey often escapes its more powerful predator by outmanoeuvring it (think seal versus white shark or cheetah versus springbok).

Tracking is another major challenge. Although it helps that the target drone is up high and alone, you will still need some relatively advanced technology to do it accurately and quickly enough to be effective. Optical tracking might be a good start, with some additional heat or sonic sensing. Those are all fairly limited in range, so how the actual target would be found I am not sure. Maybe by picking up radio or electronic signals.

Finally, for non-destructive capture a good strategy needs to be developed. Locking into the target reliably and making sure it does not interfere with your own aerial operation is not easily achieved without damaging the target craft too much.

I actually did air-to-air docking in KSP, but I guess this ups the difficulty another couple of levels

*I would strongly advise anyone not to interfere with commercial delivery drones. It will most probably carry a hefty penalty and is of course morally questionable.

Actually its easier in real life to do docking in mid-air. Its just that ksp isn't realistic. And I hate when people say about how drones can be used to spy on people.. People without drones can spy on you too.

Soon enough people will want to ban rockets from pollution which some people do. Because they think rockets aren't the way to go. And we should just stay on a egg and if a asteroid hits. Were all screwed :/

[Spica]

Well, as long as the "impact" is not literal ...

*stifles laughs*

[Vonar]

How many developed countries (the sort of countries likely to get these drones first) have such an unprofessional police service that officers using them for clay-pigeon shooting would be a daily occurrence? In my country, at least, standard officers don't even have guns on patrol, so this problem won't even happen here.

America comes to mind as a rather trigger happy nation...

[Tommygun]

Google just bought up the robotic defense contractor Boston Dynamics.

It's their eight purchase of a robotics firm over the past six months.

This could be the start of seeing robots much more often in our daily lives or just another tech bubble, time will tell.

...........Well ether that or Amazon and Google are in an arms race.