That is unless one of the routing options is “lead my position and direction at 5 mph…”
I wonder if it will be possible to order very heavy things be dropped upon your neighbor’s roof? Or even upon your neighbor? The possibilities are boggling!
Are there shotgun shells made with rubber pellets? I don’t want to hurt the neighbors, I just want to get one at close range.
You are in luck! (though, for extra irony, you might want to see if you can get them from Amazon…)
Of course, this won’t make me any lazier. If anything, it makes my delivery person lazier…
With Prime, you can get free shipping on a treadmill… one would think that gifting it to a… problematic… neighbor could be seen as a peace-offering?
Might need a Swarm, though
Has anyone thought about the abuse and theft of packages? How do they think to solve this problem, I wonder …
They’ll invent flying carpets or doormats to cover them up with?
It’s already a problem. I lived in a neighborhood once where mail-order wouldn’t stay on the stoop five minutes. It has nothing to do with drones.
My wife’s first comment when the delivery drones were first mentioned: “Neat, skeet shooting, with prizes!”
If the container opens before two-factor authentication, it calls the cops and explodes.
Thank god all of us are equally abled to be called sedentary.
I kinda think this will go the way of the Pony Express as 3D printing begins to unwind its problems.
What? She doesn’t already shoot the UPS guy and steal his stuff?
“According to the patent, the drones will be able to track the location of the person it is delivering to by pulling data from their smartphone. The unmanned vehicles will also be able to talk to each other about weather and traffic conditions.”
I can’t wait until somebody hacks Amazon’s fulfillment network and drones start hunting down people to deliver highly embarrassing products they never ordered… or the NSA installs a back door in Amazon’s fulfillment network and uses the drones to hunt down people.
I assume that these things will be pretty sensored-up for navigational and fleet-management purposes, and probably in communication with the mothership, so knocking one over is likely to be pretty easy(and not carry the more-or-less-automatically-a-felony implications of pulling a gun on a manned delivery vehicle); but knocking one over without Amazon HQ getting a good shot of you, Amazon HQ automatically calling the cops to the scene(probably to within 10s of meters accuracy), or both will be trickier.
Exploitation of more sophisticated vulnerabilities(use some sort of bug to get access to drone cargo information and reroute the valuable stuff, say) has a much better chance of being worth the risk; but will depend on the existence of specific vulnerabilities, and Amazon not fixing them, rather than just being able to down a drone.
If somebody has something against drones, or against Amazon, I’d be inclined to suspect that they’d have a very hard time hardening the system to the point of resistance against a non-economically motivated attacker(there are always going to be pockets of easy concealment with relatively poor police response time, and if somebody wants to hide out there, activate a cell jammer when a drone comes into view, take a few shots, then leave, they won’t necessarily be rewarded for their time; but they could be tricky to catch.
I still have no idea why anyone would think this is a good business idea at all.
Put aside all the technical, theft, safety, and target issues, what benefit would it give over any other means of delivery? You would need to be in range of the inventory warehouse, and drones like these have no range whatsoever. A bicycle courier would be better than these in every single way.
In the near future, “Sky Pirate” will be a real thing.
Definitely the model T delivery drone.
That’s a very urban-centric perspective. A bicycle courier would be make sense in a densely populated area with relatively level terrain, bike lanes, etc. But even in Amazon’s home city, Seattle, there are plenty of neighborhoods where it would be difficult to make that practical. Go into the Seattle suburbs, and in many of them, just riding a bicycle is on the verge of suicidal. Go a bit further out, and you’re in the woods and hills, with winding two-lane roads where running a delivery truck starts to get a lot more time-consuming, and thus, expensive. If you can literally make a bee line to your destination, you may be a lot more efficient. We don’t have visibility into Amazon’s cost analysis or other details of their R&D, but if they’re serious about this, they must have the financial and logistical analysis to back it up.
