Amazon has been working away at its Prime Air urban and suburban drone delivery for years. Many years. It’s been at least half a decade now. And for the entire time, we’ve been complaining that Amazon has been focusing on how to build drones that can physically transport objects rather than how to build drones that can safely and reliably transport objects in a manner that makes economic sense and that people actually need.
 
At its re:MARS conference today, Amazon showed off a brand-new version of its Prime Air drone. The design is really unique, highlighting a hybrid tailsitter design with 6 degrees of freedom, but people have been futzing with weird drone designs for a long time, and this may or may not be a.) what Amazon has really settled on long-term or b.) the best way of doing things, versus other strategies like Google Wing’s dangly box.
 
What’s much more fun is that Amazon looks to now be addressing the issue of safety, and has added a comprehensive suite of on-board sensing and computing that will help the drone deal with many of the complicated barriers that it’s likely to encounter while doing its job.
 
We should point out right away that Amazon’s soothing piano music signifies that you cannot hear what this drone sounds like in flight, and noise is turning out to be one of the biggest problems with urban and suburban delivery drones, as Google Wing has noticed in Australia. Amazon seems to be taking the same “oh people will just get used to it” approach as Google is, and for better or worse that’s probably what’s going to end up happening. Sigh.
 
The pretty cool bit about today’s announcement is the addition of sense and avoid to Amazon’s drones, which Jeff Wilke, Amazon’s chief executive for worldwide consumer, detailed in a blog post. This is a good start, although I would push back a tiny bit on the assertion that Wilke ends with that “our drones are safe.” This technology undoubtedly has the potential to make Amazon’s drones much safer than they were before, but my guess is that statements like “our drones can recognize and avoid wires” would probably be more precisely written as “our drones have the ability to understand and avoid wires most of the time when conditions are favorable.'
 
Our drones need to be able to identify static and moving objects coming from any direction. We employ diverse sensors and advanced algorithms, such as multi-view stereo vision, to detect static objects like a chimney. To notice moving objects, like a paraglider or helicopter, we use proprietary computer-vision and machine learning algorithms. For the drone to descend for delivery, we need a small area around the delivery location that is clear of people, animals, or obstacles. We determine this using explainable stereo vision in parallel with sophisticated AI algorithms taught to identify people and animals from above.
 
A customer’s yard may have clotheslines, telephone wires, or electrical wires. Wire detection is one of the hardest problems for low-altitude flights. Through the use of computer-vision techniques we’ve created, our drones can know and avoid wires as they descend into, and ascend out of, a customer’s yard. This is a good start, although I would push back a little bit on the assertion that Wilke ends with that “our drones are safe.” This technology definitely has the potential to make Amazon’s drones much safer than they were before, but my guess is that statements like “our drones can recognize and avoid wires” would probably be more properly written as “our drones have the capability to recognize and prevent wires most of the time when conditions are favorable.”
 
And even with all this progress, I can’t help but come back to the fundamental question of whether this kind of drone delivery is actually worth it. I love robots, and I’m having a truly hard time thinking of this as anything more than a novelty, especially considering the growth of both autonomous vehicles and sidewalk robots (which Amazon is also working on). Amazon brings up the environmental impact of delivery as another argument in favor of drones, suggesting that “an electric drone, charged using sustainable means, traveling to drop off a package is a vast improvement over a car on the road.” Likely true, as long as the car is delivering just one package—I’m not sure how the numbers work out if you’re comparing drones to a loaded delivery van, though. And again, noise pollution needs to be thought about, too.
 
Delivery drones are the right answer, I think, in some cases. Medical supply delivery is one. Remote delivery is another. It’s less clear whether suburban delivery really fills a long-term need, or whether companies like Amazon and Google are mostly just doing it because they can. But either way, it’s great to see Amazon acknowledging these hard problems, and we’re looking forth to seeing some of their technologies, like obstacle avoidance, in action, which Amazon says could happen within months.



This article is originally posted on Tronserve.com