I can imagine drone delivery's an effective solution to the last mile problem for automated delivery? Have a self-driving truck navigate through a neighborhood, the drone takes off with the package and delivers it to the doorstep and returns to the truck. The truck can continue driving around as drones rejoin it down the road.<p>Now we have both pieces of the equation: how to get to the house without paying a driver, and how to get to the porch without paying someone to walk and carry.
What is this going to sound like when cities have hundreds of whining drones flying around? Are we just going to have to get used to the noise pollution from the drones so people can get their coffee delivered faster?
Who had the bright idea to put a drone video up top that has nothing to do with Mercedes? The company in the video isn't even mentioned in the article.<p>Stay weird, Bloomberg.
That's the reverse of Mercedes' previous robot delivery scheme. They did a test with Starship Technologies delivery robots, where a van was filled up with the robots, it went somewhere, and the robots fanned out to deliver things. That would make sense for dense areas like apartment buildings and offices, once you get doors and elevators to cooperate.<p>This new test delivers stuff by drone from a distribution center to the vans, which then make local deliveries with humans. That seems backwards. The drones are doing the heavy lifting, something trucks do very well.
What's the failure mode for quadcopters, can these land safely with loss of one motor? Definition of "safely" would ideally consider human casualties.
All this drone delivery stuff is theatre until they start building obstacle detection and avoidance into them. Yes, drones can take off from point A, then fly up, over to point B, and land. We already knew this.