A commercial delivery drone carrying a six pound package landing on top of a bus between tall buildings is going to make a ridiculous discordant growl. Six of them coming and going within a quarter mile at any given time are going to sound like an auto-tuned pack of hounds from hell.<p>(This of course is ignoring what happens if something fucks up and suddenly it has 1/8th of a second to decide to fly out of it or brake those giant swinging carbon fiber blades before they encounter human flesh. It's like a trolley problem on a trolley.).<p>No way. (IMHO of course)<p>(e.g<p>Video of a Matrice 600 with a payload of ~8lbs <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jayVMmvLxOA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jayVMmvLxOA</a><p>Even better, 25 lbs from 60' up lol <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jULQrdUTngM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jULQrdUTngM</a><p>)
Perhaps we could load all the packages into some sort of specialized "package bus", and the driver could drive it around town all day on an optimized route and carry the packages to the customer's door himself.<p>Joking aside, that does raise the idea of using a delivery truck as sort of a carrier for rechargable drones; truck drives around, packages are automatically distributed to a pool of drones who handle the last hundred yards of delivery and return to the truck to reload/recharge.
Why does the leisure class get funding for this nonsense? An y new "invention" either seems to spy on people or annoy the hell out of them.<p><i>Drones are a visual nuisance and produce noise.</i> Do you want to disturb bus riders and residential areas.<p>The Silicon Valley episode where a Stanford lab produced a robotic deer that is completely useless but caused a road accident is reality.<p>I hope people will react like Erlich Bachman when these drones become a thing.
I've been joking for awhile now that UPS/FedEx trucks could become 'aircraft carriers', carrying a set of drones along with the packages, using the drones for the 'last mile' of delivery.
Imagine a world in which we don't need individual cars, because public transport is sufficient; passengers and cargo are pooled into compartments; compartments pooled and unpooled mid-trip as needed to maximize total efficiency; where traffic runs underground and on a rail where that makes sense; where stations can be very large or very small based on traffic; where the economics of laying out the tunnels is such that it makes sense to build small stations; where car roads are a rarity; where safety is not relient on human judgment, skill or reaction time; where transportation is not dependent on fossil fuels. Aah, those things are pleasant to imagine.
Just imaging, every car has a landing platform on the roof. A centralized traffic system knows the destination of each car. Drones can just jump cars, and if there is no car going in the right direction, lift off and finish the rest of route themselves.
I'm still holding out hope for ballistic delivery from UP/Ex launchers, as envisioned by Vernor Vinge in Rainbow's End. A solid fling and a guided parachute might actually work. Major airspace sharing concerns, of course.
This is a terrible idea. Taxpayers pay for the fuel in that bus, the maintenance of that bus, and the roads it rides on. We’re not funding that so Jeff Bezos can add another hundred million to his pocket tax free. This is bullshit. If delivery companies want to profit off the public transportation system, they should be paying into said system. Especially if their new plan to deliver their goods is designed to undermine and circumvent the US Postal Service, another taxpayer funded delivery system.
I don't understand why the default assumption is that delivery drones need to fly. It seems like you could have a bus-ful of small wheeled drones that could achieve many of the benefits with much fewer safety concerns.<p>Would need to make a package lockbox similar to a mailbox that is accessible by the dronecars, but I think in this day and age of frequent package theft, many would go along with it.
I do wonder if drone delivery will take off (heh). A lot has been said about the disadvantages, but one also has to also wonder about the advantages.<p>There's a point at which things are "good enough", and small improvements aren't really worth the costs. How much time would using drones for the last couple kilometers save? A few hours? Local delivery trucks tend to make rounds every day, so it really does seem like the maximum amount of time drone delivery could save is one day.<p>Will the cost of operating this (not only monetary, but also organizational, and in terms of noise pollution, drone repair, the occasional package/drone lost, etc) be worth the whole one day faster delivery to customers?<p>This, especially considering drones can't deliver everything, so trucks would have to keep operating. Truck's are large— economically what makes sense is to have them full of packages and with a whole-day schedule. Would drone usage offset enough deliveries to cut a few truck routes? Would they be enough to make it all worth?<p>A lot of questions in the air (heh).
There is a youtube video at the start of the article with a presentation of the system. A simulation is shown on the map of SF.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/2U8jI-n9Ulk" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/2U8jI-n9Ulk</a>
Or, run special carts up and down main drags for drones to hitch rides (and perhaps charge while riding?). Instead of combining them with human transport, to the detriment of both humans and drones.
Here's the actual paper:
<a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.11840.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.11840.pdf</a><p>Here's the code:
<a href="https://github.com/sisl/MultiAgentAllocationTransit.jl" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/sisl/MultiAgentAllocationTransit.jl</a><p>Much more interesting that some sensationalist "Wow, AI drones are taking the bus" piece
When I saw the title, I thought this was brilliant! But I thought they meant a "drone" more like these: <a href="https://www.starship.xyz/" rel="nofollow">https://www.starship.xyz/</a>. (Turns out google responds better to searching for robots when looking those up). A ground robot would alleviate a lot of the concerns about noise and other problems with urban air travel.
Ok,this is sort of brilliant in it's simplicity and ability to use existing resources. A while back i read an article that theorized that there would be cars all over carrying drones and cars would do most of the transportation while the drones did the last mile or so. Here is a practical example.
so, I'm a rock climber, and I'd never go into the mountains without a helmet. because falling objects to the head <i>kill</i>.<p>What are people even thinking, mixing spaces for humans with our fragile little egg heads and corporate swarms of falling death blocks?<p>hmm...
Why stop at buses? Why not have drones land on self-driving cars that integrate with Bluetooth?<p>Never mind the noise; we'll design the cars such they output the inverse frequencies being output by the drones, canceling out their sound.<p>Even better, the drones can be designed to look like pies.