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.
leading to a brush fire that stretched across 25 acres
Bruh
Helicopters are against god. An affront to nature. Nothing with a rotating wing can be allowed to live.
We're coming for you you little backwards and up and down flying freaks.
my flight instructor used to call them flying leafblowers (derogatory)
You are a hastily-sketched fever dream in one of Da Vinci's notebooks
I am a 0/2 artifact creature with no casting cost.
We are not the same.
Apparently once they ironed the bugs out the Osprey has about the same accident rate as any other rotor wing aircraft. I haven't checked the stats though maybe they did average out to being death traps.
This is, no shit, one of the teleological reason capitalism exists, lol. To expand the organic composition of labour, so they can avoid paying variable costs. One goes on the good investing side of the ledger in their accounting and wages go on the bad expenses side.
"Citing a high employee turnover rate" my brother in Christ, you encourage the high turnover rates by treating them like drones.
delivering the mail via RC helicopter sounds like a 7 year old thought of it
Add it to the list of liberal solutions to things we thought of as kids, along with "I would shoot the bad guy in the leg"
For me it was "just build the roads underground so they don't take up space"
Lol Walt Disney designed Epcot like that. He fucking hated cars, almost as much as minorities and communists.
But yeah his solution was trains for everything and if anyone wanted to visit his little kingdom in the swamps of Florida via car he didn't want to see them, so underground
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.
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.
https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-c1-colorado-drones-20140116-dto-htmlstory.html
The most interesting part is towards the end.
It turned out that Steel was a suspect involving a strange incident at his workplace in Arvada, about 60 miles away, in which a co-worker told police that when he picked up his telephone, liquid mercury oozed out of the receiver and onto his face.
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.
Like most burn up tech work it is missing relevant safety standards for software design and verification so, yeah, it's going to crash and burn a lot. There's no reason why a company like Amazon would do anything other than the bare minimum in terms of device safety and testing unless they are compelled to by some state agency. Faster development = shiny new demos for shareholders = more investment capital = middle and high level managers get big bonuses.
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.
Last year, a Wired report revealed that Amazon’s drone delivery operation is struggling just as much in the UK, despite making its first-ever drone delivery near Cambridge in 2016. Wired’s report suggests that the UK outfit is marred by some of the same issues described by Bloomberg, including a high turnover rate and potential safety issues. At a UK-based facility for analyzing drone footage for people and animals, one worker reportedly drank beer on the job, while Wired said another held down the “approve” button on their computer regardless of whether there were hazards in the footage or not.
one worker reportedly drank beer on the job, while Wired said another held down the “approve” button on their computer regardless of whether there were hazards in the footage or not.
:rat-salute:
Getting brained because a drone algorithmically-fed by a drunkard English said my head was a non-dangerous object.
Like 5 years ago someone told me "you know those amazon drone things were an April Fools joke, right?" and I wish I still believed that, what a ridiculous idea
Can't wait to be killed by one of these dumb things falling out of the sky and landing on my head.
Unlike most high tech automation ideas that get hyped up by big tech, I don't think delivery drones are that bad of an idea. It's not something where "just build a train" applies, you'd at least also need pneumatic tubes sucking packages out of the trains.
But the idea that Amazon could pull it off is laughable. Yeah let's do novel safety-critical research at the company whose management strategy is abusing new college grads into working 80 hour weeks until they burn out after 1.75 years. That's gonna work.
An autonomous tricycle that just hangs out on the side of the road or the sidewalk would actually be feasible because of a little secret I like to call "the wheel". But no, it's gotta be incredibly inefficient, unreliable, dangerous, and super annoyingly loud mini-copters.
An autonomous tricycle would have to do obstacle avoidance. The advantage of flying drones is that there's less stuff in the air.
