Do you think we'll have a great global delivery system aided by drones one day?
Do you think we'll have a great global delivery system aided by drones one day?
David Ortiz
Leo Thomas
Doubtful, too much cost and too much risk. People would weaponize them and try to find ways to get them to fall out of the sky. Personally id salvage them for parts and steal whatever I can and maybe make my own flamethrower drones
Asher Rogers
We will. There will be a doordash or postmates within a year or two that uses a hundred drones per city.
But i belive that eliminating the human factor is not the solution.
Jason Turner
So here's the problem: a delivery truck can deliver hundreds of packages a day. Sure, in an urban environment the delivery truck will take longer to get there than the drone, however, it is far more efficient. Whereas the drone charges, leaves the DC, delivers to the address, and then returns to the DC to spend 30-120 minutes charging, the delivery truck can make trip after trip, delivering package after package, on a single tank of gas. Furthermore, let's say 100 drones were making deliveries all day, which took on average ten minutes to get to from the DC. They then took 30 minutes to charge. That's 50 minutes a package. Let's say another ten minutes for loading-time. That's an hour. That means one drone could deliver _only_ 24 packages in a day. Now, who wants to get a package at 2am? No one! Most urban UPS drivers deliver between 9 and 4. Let's say the drones can that's only 7 packages a drone could do. All 100 of your drones would be delivering one trucks-worth of deliveries in a day.
UPS has 119k delivery "vehicles", which is everything from the big trucks to motorcycles, globally. They also only have 1,800 DCs. Yet, they're able to deliver 20 million packages and documents a day. That's an average of 168+ packages per vehicle, per day. It just doesn't make sense to use drones.
The logistics of using drones are ridiculous. Not only do you have the time and lack of volume-per-drone, but you have a major infrastructure problem. Given their limited distance, you'd have to have a DC in every single city that gets drone deliveries. That means every DC would have to have whatever the consumer is ordering. Because, if it has to get shipped from another DC, then the whole purpose of having a drone delivery is mute. Furthermore, given their limited range (remember they have to get there under load, and then return), many geographically larger cities, like LA for instance, would have to have several DCs, all with what the consumer is going to order. Think of the cost! Not to mention, to actually be effective, every DC would have to have hundreds of drones.
Jason Gonzalez
Highway robbery will make a comeback, except this time it will be drones robbing other drones.
Brayden Brown
literally the only thing that prevents this from happening is niggers.
Kayden Phillips
Even if drones did magically become more efficient than what we have at the moment, the dominant problem would still remain - absolutely retarded routing algorithms. Ask any delivery truck driver in any country and you'll get horror stories of how inefficient their paths for the day are. Especially if it's some multinational shithole like Amazon.
Lucas Hernandez
I imagine you posted this because they'd bat the fuck out of drones for sport but it's also true because Amazon's delivery contractors have been hiring near-minimum wage deliverymen who provide their own vehicles. I'd wager the cost on Amazon's end is something like three bucks a package, if that.
Liam Gonzalez
Also simply buying more drones to make up for downtime is a non-issue.
Robots don't care if their route was efficient, only that they had followed it properly.
Joseph Roberts
If I see these in real life I'm heading down to sports basement to get myself a pellet gun.