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According to The Guardian, Amazon has made real drone deliveries to real customers in Cambridge, UK. At present the "Prime Air" service is only available to two Amazon Prime customers with large gardens who happen to live close to Amazon's UK depot, but they hope to extend the service to dozens more in the coming months.
Apparently the drone was fully autonomous, with no human operator, and the time from placing an order to delivery was just 13 minutes. A video of the delivery can be found in the linked article.
Is this the future?
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Amazon Reports First Ever Successful Autonomous Drone Delivery
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(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday December 15 2016, @07:15PM
The vast majority of people live in cities, with all kinds of obstacles, vandals, thieves, masses of pigeons, wires across roads, odd wind patterns between buildings, etc...
I see nothing in the above that will present a problem to a drone. Unless you live in the city center, flying at 200 (agl) feet avoids ALL of that.
Vandals and thieves are already a problem for package delivery especially when people are not home. But apparently its manageable, insurable, or simply not as big a deal as you suggest.
Looking around my neighborhood (Washington State) there are no such problems other than the occasional 100 foot trees. Even off-the-shelf autonomous drones can optically avoid those these days.
The big problem is packages dumped in lawn or driveway, rather than on the porch, by the door, out of the weather, simply because drones can't yet maneuver reliably in tight quarters like your typical suburban entry.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday December 15 2016, @07:50PM
Unfortunately, most of those become an issue as soon as your drone finishes the "travel from warehouse to target address" phase and begins the "deliver the package" phase, then it has to deal with the erratic wind, pigeons, wires, etc. as it approaches it's delivery point.
Still, I could see that being handled well enough in time, if maybe not right away. And if the goal is 30-minute deliveries, as I think I've heard, then thieves can be minimized as well - the recipient knows it's on the way, and you can send them a text message saying "Package delivery will be completed in 2 minutes" so that they can be waiting to pick it up as soon as the drone has departed, not unlike waiting for the knock from a pizza delivery person.
As for vandalism - that's harder to prevent, but it's already ridiculously easy to throw rocks at moving cars, but it doesn't happen often. Probably because it's generally pretty easy to ID the perpetrator, and there's no benefit to outweigh the cost.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Thursday December 15 2016, @08:19PM
How about this location in my neighborhood: https://goo.gl/maps/7uSUJiQa4Sq [goo.gl] Those are apartments so, maybe yard access? Maybe not. Too many random obstacles. I'd like to see more Amazon lockers. Currently I have everything shipped to work and since I commute by car, it's easy to bring home.