Three stories all looking at how deliveries might be made in the near future:
Google Drone Deliveries by 2017, While Skype Founders' Bots Keep Down to Earth
Google has put a tentative date on deliveries by drone:
Search giant Google has announced a date for the launch of its drone delivery service. Called Project Wing, the initiative aims to be delivering goods to consumers using the robot aircraft sometime in 2017. The announcement came from David Vos, the project leader for the delivery service. Online retailers such as Amazon, Alibaba and others are also experimenting with drone delivery. "Our goal is to have commercial business up and running in 2017," said Mr Vos during a speech at an air traffic control convention being held in Washington.
Meanwhile, Skype's co-founders are working on a more grounded approach:
Skype co-founders Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis are poised to unleash a fleet of trundling robodelivery vehicles, promising to get up to two bags of groceries to your door within 30 minutes.
Starship Technologies' bots, which are capable of delivering up to 5km from a central hub at a leisurely 6km/h, have all the bells and whistles you'd expect from the ultra modern alternative to the delivery boy's bicycle – low carbon footprint, autonomous operation, obstacle avoidance capability, mobile app tracking, and so forth.
The blurb explains:
Starship's robots can drive intelligently on the sidewalks at pedestrian speeds. They know their location and can navigate their way through an area with perfect precision all whilst seamlessly merging with pedestrian traffic. The robots can detect obstacles, adjust speed or stop and safely cross the streets.
Additionally, Starship's robots are monitored by human operators who can, at any time, take control over the device and view the world through the robot's eyes, communicating with people around it if necessary.
Australia Post Could Soon be Delivering Packages with Drones
Australia Post is trialling the use of drones for package deliveries as early as next year. The drones, which will cost $10,000 each, will allow packages up to 2kg to be delivered over 25km with the possibility of transporting 10kg on the discussion table.
“It meets all of the flying requirements, has backup engines, gps co-ordinates, so we can put it right on their patio,” Chief executive Ahmed Fahour told the AFR.
“It’s the thin edge of trying to demonstrate that when you think of Australia Post – they’re innovative. We’re hopefully trying to show with the lockers [for parcel pick up], the app, that we are innovative.”
The drone trials will be a new 21st century addition to the national postal service who has in recent years, faced logistical issues such as delayed services despite installing $500 million worth of "state-of-the-art" parcel sorting machines in Sydney and Melbourne last year.
Related Stories
Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956
The future in home delivery is quickly approaching -- in fact, it's travelling at six kilometres per hour and has that milk you ordered 10 minutes ago. [...] Under a new company called Starship, the creators of Skype have begun testing an autonomous delivery robot capable of rolling to your house with whatever items you’ve ordered from local businesses.
[...] The robot has sensors that let it stop and avoid any pedestrians or other obstacles. It's also monitored by humans, who can take over if there are any problems, or activate a speaker to let thieves know they're being filmed. [...] Starship has already tested their creation in the U.K. and is now letting it drive around Washington D.C., with hopes it'll soon begin crawling around sidewalks everywhere.
Source: Self-driving robot might be future of home delivery
takyon: We reported on this Skype robot and similar services back in November.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Alphatool on Wednesday November 04 2015, @11:49AM
Australia Post may try to innovate, but it won't help if they can't get the basics right. I'm based in Australia, and the company I work for has completely stopped using Australia Post. They misplace so much stuff that if we absolutely have to send a hard copy document it's worth spending the $10 on a courier to make sure it gets there. If they can't get a simple letter right what hope do they have with drones?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04 2015, @11:54AM
either that or the people hired to fill out the postal address on the envelopes are retards
(Score: 2, Informative) by axsdenied on Wednesday November 04 2015, @12:11PM
Completely agree, AU post lost so much market share by adjusting too slowly to the technological advances. The drone delivery may give them back the edge, if they were not completely useless.
Few more examples of how "great" they are:
1. Express post next day guaranteed delivery from Sydney to Melbourne took 5/days.
2. Their package tracking consists of pretty much "in transit" and "delivered". Absolutely no details about the "in transit" part... All we know is that it may turn up at some stage... Or not.
3. So many times they don't even bother delivering packages. They just drop off a note to pick it up from the post office. What are we paying for...
(Score: 2) by arslan on Wednesday November 04 2015, @10:12PM
Actually the drones might help. I find AUS Post staff very rude, especially so in my suburb.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04 2015, @11:52AM
when the robot and drone armies become sentient, we can take comfort knowing that at least they aren't human
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Wednesday November 04 2015, @12:26PM
Seriously. They deliver more stuff to more people in more places more accurately more efficiently than any other organization on the planet.
And their system? Some of it is super-fancy technology like very good OCR. Some of it is hand-sorting. They adjust what they're doing so that they aren't trying to do the same procedures in Manhattan as they are in Alaska.
As for why people think they suck, there are basically 3 reasons:
1. If you're rich, you're used to everybody jumping to your command immediately. By contrast, the post office is dedicated to serving everybody equally, so you'll wait in line just like everybody else even if you're Bill Gates.
2. Their finances are hurting. Not because of anything they did, but because the demand for letters dropped, and Congress demanded that they fund their pensions for 75 years into the future (something that no other pension fund anywhere has to do).
3. Many of their workers are unionized, and for some people union always implies "bad" regardless of any other factor. It's like the idea that somebody whose job is mostly fairly simple physical labor getting a good wage is downright offensive to some folks.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by schad on Wednesday November 04 2015, @01:54PM
That might be the most moronic defense of terrible service that I've ever read in my entire life. If Bill Gates goes to the supermarket, he has to wait in line at the checkout counter too. They don't have somebody running around inside the store looking for rich people and carrying them in palanquins to the special Super-Secret Checkout Line where the sort order is based on your net worth.
I get more courtesy, professionalism, and attention to detail from the teenager who bags my groceries at the supermarket than I do from the people who work at the USPS. Even though the kid is paid probably less than half as much and has basically zero benefits. That's a pretty serious sign that something is very badly wrong.
No, what's offensive is that USPS employees are so often seen not working, or not caring about their work, or not giving a rat's ass about the people they ostensibly work for (the public). We see behavior that would never be tolerated anywhere else, and yet many USPS employees get benefits that the rest of us -- people who actually take pride in our work, who show up on time, who try to put on a smile and behave professionally even if we're having a shitty day -- do not.
Now, I am certainly generalizing. Probably there are good USPS employees out there. But I sure haven't seen any. Maybe they all work in non-customer facing roles. That would make sense; after all, nearly everything I mail does (eventually) end up at its intended destination. So there's got to be some level of basic competence somewhere in the organization.
And at a certain point, you've really got to figure there's something wrong with the culture of the place. I mean, they can't all be surly, grim, lazy, incompetent, and unlikable people when they're first hired, right? It's got to be something about the USPS itself that grinds people down into a sort of uniform awfulness. Maybe that's what it is. You start out full of optimism and drive, and then the relentless bureaucracy crushes your spirit. Although the private sector sure has its share of soul-destroying bureaucracy, and most of us bear up under its weight better than USPS employees seem to.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday November 04 2015, @02:58PM
I don't know when the last time you went to a post office or talked to your mail carrier, but my experience is completely different: As in, everybody I've dealt with at the USPS has been unfailingly polite and doing their best to serve everybody that came by. And their customer satisfaction surveys [usps.com] seem to suggest that that's a significant majority of experiences.
And this has been true regardless of where I was: Rural Vermont, college town in Ohio, an inner-city mostly Hispanic neighborhood, and suburbia.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday November 04 2015, @03:15PM
His problem is they aren't going out of business or rebranding like other corporations "are supposed to do". And they're national so everyone in the country gets in on the hate.
My MiL still hates this sub chain that went out of business about a decade ago. I would imagine people younger than twenty or so will never have the chance to hate that sub shop the way she does. Also it was very small scale with only a couple dozen franchises so the name of that sub shop would be meaningless to 95% of the population. Humorously I can't remember the name of that sub shop, as if it matters.
Now if the USPS would just rename and rebrand itself every couple years, maybe call themselves "Eagle Delivery" this year... Maybe have a different corporate DBA in every state, then complaining in Portland in 2014 about "National Post Service" will make no sense to people in my state this year served by "Eagle Delivery".
The other part is complaining about a national chain on a world wide network is right up there with complaining about your individual local cell tower service as if that means anything to anyone more than a half mile away. Even 99% customer sat means the entire planet is going to have to listen endlessly about how the nowheresville office sucks, even if 99% of us will never do business with the nowheresville office and therefore don't really care.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday November 04 2015, @04:36PM
Of course, the problem with going out of business periodically is that all the institutional knowledge goes away with it.
The other thing is that the USPS does a lot of things that are unprofitable but extremely useful, like
- Creating and managing a consistent and clear addressing system for every home in the country. That's kind of a big deal.
- Delivering to every point in the US, regardless of how convenient it is to get to it. For example, they'll deliver to Hartland, Kansas no problem. And you might say "But FedEx and UPS deliver there too!", but the way they do that is to contract with the USPS to do the part of the job where the package ends up on the right doorstep.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday November 05 2015, @03:34PM
Not just in the middle of nowhere -- FedEx does that in the middle of Providence, RI too. And between the two of them they *still* can't get a single damn package to my door...
(Score: 2) by schad on Wednesday November 04 2015, @06:16PM
Well, now I guess I don't need to wonder about what my problem is.
The USPS has been through a few bouts of rebranding. I seem to remember a pretty big one back in the late 90s or early 2000s. In 2013 they renamed "Express Mail" to "Priority Mail Express." [postalnews.com] They did a bigger one in 2013 that changed all the interior designs of their stores. [grand-army.com]
OK, so basically no complaining about anything.
You're technically correct; it's possible that my negative experiences with the USPS are confined to the specific POs and employees with which/whom I've interacted. To the extent that USPS processes and rules are uniform across all POs, however, I can correctly generalize. If your local cell tower service is terrible because the national carrier's policy is to oversubscribe its towers, you can correctly bitch about it on a national forum. If your local service is terrible because the worldwide standard for cell radios gets screwed up by trees, mountains, and inclement weather, you can correctly bitch about it on a global forum.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday November 04 2015, @07:00PM
OK, so basically no complaining about anything.
About the locals, specifically.
The world wide 2nd shift call center in Australia for enterprise Cisco router support at least used to be pretty awesome (maybe it still is, I donno), and there is some point in discussing that in a world wide forum because every enterprise customer with a support contact over 7 figures or whatever my previous employer was, would talk to the same guys in .au, so its logical to debate and compare.
I guess the best cell phone analogy would be if the whole planet gets the same India call center for billing problems, then its worthwhile for the whole planet to discuss it.
because the worldwide standard for cell radios gets screwed up by ... mountains
See there you go. The closest thing to a real mountain is at least 800 miles from where I live. Its just not worth discussing on a world wide forum.
(Score: 2) by schad on Wednesday November 04 2015, @05:49PM
About two months ago, to get our passports.
I don't talk to our current one. She chain-smokes in her truck, and I quit recently enough that it's tough to be around that. I've waved to her a few times but she doesn't wave back (though she may not see me). Didn't talk to the previous one much, but she always left packages not by our front door but right up against our garage door. One package was destroyed by being backed over. Two others were destroyed by rain (they were left out all weekend because we can't see there from inside the house). We also had more than a few illegible bills because she always left our mailbox open. On windy days nontrivial amounts of rain would blow in there.
That's not been my experience. As best I can remember, there's always been some problem that required the worker to go into the back for 5-15 minutes in order to resolve. The reason varied but there was always something.
As I implied but didn't say outright, the plural of anecdote isn't data. I'm not really trying to say that the USPS is universally shit. What I'm trying to do is explain why some people say that it sucks. It's not because we're ultra-rich, or opposed to equality, or want it to go bankrupt, or hate unions. It's because we've had genuinely terrible experiences. In my case, my experiences have been exclusively terrible. Out of the several dozen nontrivial interactions I've had with the USPS, they have all been bad. Levels of bad that had me literally shaking with anger, in more than a few instances.
tl;dr -- Your original comment was one big straw man, and I set out to show it.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday November 04 2015, @09:48PM
Bill Gates does not wait in lines no matter where he goes.
I've seen him in person sail through any lines, with obsequious minions and everyday people rushing to hold doors, bypass lines, jump queues etc. And this was back in the day (20 years ago) when he didn't travel with an army of UZI toting security people. Its probably more so today.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday November 04 2015, @04:08PM
4. The existence of junk mail. Don't forget the piles of waste that you can only get through first class presorted mail.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04 2015, @05:27PM
They deliver more stuff to more people in more places more accurately more efficiently than any other organization on the planet.
Reference?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04 2015, @08:05PM
I bet the lunch box delivery services in India beat the USPS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabbawala [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday November 05 2015, @03:17PM
I'd love USPS if only they could manage to get my packages to my door, or at least leave a damn note. Instead they just hand it to whoever happens to be standing nearby, and god only knows if or when I'll actually get it (haven't lost one yet, but they regularly disappear for a week or two before whoever has it lets me know...and since they generally have no tracking, I sometimes don't even know if it's shipped yet)
I'm seriously considering paying for a mailbox at UPS and getting anything that won't ship via UPS shipped *to* UPS, because they're the only company that can actually manage to leave my deliveries at my damn door on time (In fact, they're usually early...)
And then there's the spam they send out...I literally spent over six months back and forth with Redplum trying to get unsubscribed from their damn mailing list...only to discover I'm now getting them delivered every week direct from the post office, without even an address on the damn things, and no way to stop them...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04 2015, @02:25PM
Mark my words, these things will be found to "accidentally" do Google's spying missions, peeping into our houses as they deliver packages.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday November 04 2015, @03:20PM
our houses
Who's this "our" given that the price is likely to be astronomical and due to income inequality etc this is likely to be about as "general public" as owning your own business jet.
That does have some interesting privacy implications, in that pissing off 1%ers is likely to have more impact than pissing off "people of walmart" folks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04 2015, @04:11PM
Someone made a video about advances in automation, with an emphasis on automated vehicles, called "Humans Need not Apply":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Wednesday November 04 2015, @04:50PM
Starship's robots can drive intelligently on the sidewalks at pedestrian speeds. They know their location and can navigate .... whilst seamlessly merging with pedestrian traffic. The robots can detect obstacles, adjust speed or stop and safely cross the streets.
I wonder if they can detect muggers and gangs of inner-city yobs and find an alternative route? Otherwise they will get no further - they will be easy and fun prey. Perhaps "seamlessly merging" means "quietly disappearing". Perhaps they don't have muggers in Estonia (where the idea comes from).
Alternatively the robots can turn and run away, but they'll need to go at a lot more than "a leisurely 6 km/h".
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday November 04 2015, @09:52PM
My thoughts exactly.
This will become an entire new sport. Creative ways of gathering groceries while recycling delivery bot parts into ghetto toys.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Username on Wednesday November 04 2015, @05:11PM
How will their drones find it?
I would think a giant air cannon shooting my packages to me would be more reliable.
(Score: 4, Funny) by richtopia on Wednesday November 04 2015, @05:56PM
The correct answer is Pneumatic tubes!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube#Applications [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04 2015, @10:10PM
Pneumatic tubes are fine until someone orders a hardback book, a turkey, or really anything much bigger than a double-ended dildo and a pack of D cells. Unless of course you've got really big tubes in mind, à la Futurama?