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.
This is dumb as fuck, quadcopter drones are only good because the software to control them is really easy to make. They have an inherent design flaw in that any issues with the motors make them fall out of the sky like a rock, and there isn't any way around it. That is something you can't effectively make safe because engines will always fail from time to time.
A helicopter or gyrocopter design has engine out landing capabilities. It would be difficult to program an ai to be able to take advantage of these abilities, but the hardware can do it. They also are more efficient, stretching the batteries/fuel further. Sticking with quadcopter drones was entirely done to cut costs. They inherently unsafe.
Also this whole cyclical pitch control shenanigans seems like a way more complex piece of hardware than just a bunch of electric motors.
Yes, but can be kinda worked around via gyrocopter designs. They usually have a simpler cyclic where the whole rotor is tilted, (so it's not actually a cyclic) and also typically have a tail that can have control surfaces. There are also designs like the Volocity where they just have a fuckton of smaller propellers, so one or two failing is proportionally a much smaller loss of thrust and control.
Amazon isn't even trying anything, they are just doing what works on a small scale bigger and ignoring the problems being bigger causes.