The following month, a drone’s motor shut off as it switched from an upward flight path to flying straight ahead. Two safety features — one that’s supposed to land the drone in this type of situation and another that stabilizes the drone — both failed. As a result, the drone flipped upside down and dropped from 160 feet in the air, leading to a brush fire that stretched across 25 acres. It was later put out by the local fire department.
What happens if there's rain or a light breeze outside?
My theory is that the drone delivery is part of a strategy of getting in talented engineers to work on projects they would otherwise not be interested in. You're right, that's a hard engineering problem. It's such a hard problem that engineers are interested in it, but corporations would prefer to avoid ever having to tackle it. The engineers who work on it however have transferable skills that apply to military contracts amazon has. I think shit like this is meant to attract control theory phds who don't want to work for the MIC by selling them a cool control theory problem, then assigning them to a military project when they have a mortgage to pay off. My borderline conspiratorial take.
Or it's just to avoid them working for a competitor or potential Amazon supplier. They'd rather keep engineers in house than risk them working at a startup that makes drones which Amazon would end up buying. Like you said, it's a problem engineers want to work on, so might as well throw them some bones so one of those egg-heads doesn't become the "drone king" and have us by the throat with the tech.
Lots of tech companies do this. The main reason tech salaries are high is because of this practice - nothing to do with "rockstar coders", just the simple fact that it's easier for someone with this "disruptive" kind of skill to start their own business than say a nuclear engineer or an someone who designs jet engines.
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The real problem is fog.
Drones with umbrellas is our plan here at Amazon for the former.
I'm still working on the latter, but it's a contract position and I'm making a killing, so I'm going to hold off on a solution for a while.
These things are probably waterproof and I'm sure they are huge, they can probably handle a decent amount of wind.
My concern is birds, power lines, etc. that they either can't plan for or might not "see". I'm going to guess that dozens of pedestrians get maimed or killed in the first few weeks if they ever seriously roll these things out, and amazon will have a massive specialized legal team prepared to handle it.
I hope people shoot them out of the sky lmao
https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-c1-colorado-drones-20140116-dto-htmlstory.html
The most interesting part is towards the end.
air piracy
It would cause new regulations on commercial uses of drones to be made, no doubt. Which would probably affect drones that shoot videos and photos that are monitized.