A commercial delivery drone carrying a six pound package landing on top of a bus between tall buildings is going to make a ridiculous discordant growl. Six of them coming and going within a quarter mile at any given time are going to sound like an auto-tuned pack of hounds from hell.
(This of course is ignoring what happens if something fucks up and suddenly it has 1/8th of a second to decide to fly out of it or brake those giant swinging carbon fiber blades before they encounter human flesh. It's like a trolley problem on a trolley.).
Using RC helicopters instead of quadrotors would mitigate that a little.
Another mitigation could be to specify allowed jump points (for example on big street crossings where the noise from cars would drown the drones' noise anyway).
If the difference is big enough it's like adding 0.01 to 10. You'd need a lot of drones to influence the total noise level noticeably.
From my experience (Fimi 8 SE ~ 300g drone) the drone is annoyingly loud at < 5meters, and becomes practicaly silent at >50 meters (at least I don't hear it anymore).
Use the mesh which they already need to have to timesync their onboard systems, and have that modulate the rotors according to their ambient awareness. Profit by having an ubiquitous PA booming down from the heavens above...
While true, you can take advantage of the fact the most people don't perceive 2 sources of identical noise as 'twice as loud'. And given the extensive dynamic range of sound it is not uncommon to drown out sound with noise that's a few orders of magnitude louder.
Though I reckon it's more likely that the constant noise of drones will drown out the traffic noise than the other way around. Not just because it's constant but also because it's LOUD.
Yeah... in particular, part of the unworldly annoyance of drones is hearing 4~6 slightly different pitches, all constantly changing, as each prop spins at its own speed to make slight corrections.
Well if a sound is loud enough it's going to drown out everything else just by being much much louder. You can't hear a pin drop when lots of people are talking for instance.
That said I estimate a drone to be much louder than regular traffic, at least inside cities.
Even better is if the recipient is the one making the last mile trek on that bike. The logistics of delivering to a hub vs to a hub then also your individual door for that one box of post it notes are so much better for the environment.
I'm quietly hoping and waiting for online stores to take over empty store fronts for last mile delivery. Would love to be able to walk a block away, get my Amazon order, and return it there.
Now imagine that instead of returning something back to a central warehouse, Amazon could have the next customer pick it up or ship it nearby.
Hopefully boxes would not be needed for most of this, too. And any online store(s) could do this.
Tell that to the people with Raptors that use Lawrence Expressway as a public drag race track. Half the point of all these race cars is that they're loud as fuck.
The camera is within 3 feet of that thing and it’s what 75 DB? Compared to the normal city traffic that relatively quiet as it’s horns, squealing breaks, backup beeper etc that are really annoying. On top of this, they are not going to spend very long at street level. IMO, the only real noise issue is raising the street level sounds to higher floors. That’s likely to get serious opposition in many cities.
The critical issues of safety etc seem like a much bigger deal to me.
Is anyone working on solving the noise problem with drones? Is it even really solvable in any realistic way? What would it take to have a "silent" drone?
I have often wondered if larger, shrouded, multi-bladed rotors that can spin at a much lower speed can work. Perhaps uneven blade spacing — or even articulated blades with tunable lead-lag hinges to modulate blade spacing — to spread the noise over a greater frequency range.
See, drones traded moving parts for the annoying whiny motors(but fixed in a rigid frame). If we are going to use moving parts anyway, there's helicopters.
First-hand experience: helicopters are wildly more difficult to fly.
Perhaps the lead-lag hinges can be elastomeric and one could purchase props with different fixed hinge stiffnesses for different amounts of noise dampening or frequency spread but perhaps at the cost of prop-speed change response? There'd probably have to be some compensatory mechanism in the flight- or motor-control software that'd be set for a given prop's hinge elasticity.
Of course, I am just idly speculating here on whether there's any benefit at all to any of my blather.
A lighter than air mothership makes a lot of sense. You could have the delivery drones glide to the location, fire up the propellers for the controlled package dropoff, then fly back.
Qualitative opinion as someone who flies drones for fun and profit: yeah, drones, specially the bigger ones (e.g., M600), can be really loud. Once they get above a certain altitude you won't notice the noise, specially in a crowded urban setting, but in quieter residential areas I could see this being an issue. As others said there are ways to mitigate the noise, but at the cost of efficiency.
> those giant swinging carbon fiber blades before they encounter human flesh
Rotor guards exist. They reduce efficiency, but if this is a major concern, it can be done.
Not much can be done today about the noise, short of not using drones and switching to helicopters, with larger, but slower moving blades (more difficult to guard them too).
Am I correct to assume that most of the noise is coming from there being an increased amount of air turbulence coming off the prop blades than their would be were the drone (and thus it's props) less heavily loaded?
Small and light drones are still very noisy. It is not as bad when it's in a steady state, but any maneuvering increases noise by a lot. We have replaced moving parts (as in helicopter swashplates) with fixed, but quick to react motors, spinning at a very high speed. Those generate lots of turbulence whenever they need to shift speeds for maneuvers.
There's someone in this thread saying that their F150 is less noisy than a drone. That is unlikely to be true, but the emitted frequencies are very different. A high pitch whine is, for whatever reason, very noticeable, compared to a lower pitch of similar amplitude. Think dentist drills.
I'm 300 feet from the street in my apartment and I can hear the buses putter along the road and board at the stop, car horns, backup beeping, truck hydraulic brakes, and heavy construction. I don't think an RC drone that sounds like a case fan is going to add much to the cacophony.
Except an RC drone doesn't sound anything like a case fan. It sounds like a swarm of hornets. Maybe that's why it is such a grating sound to human ears.
Perhaps we could load all the packages into some sort of specialized "package bus", and the driver could drive it around town all day on an optimized route and carry the packages to the customer's door himself.
Joking aside, that does raise the idea of using a delivery truck as sort of a carrier for rechargable drones; truck drives around, packages are automatically distributed to a pool of drones who handle the last hundred yards of delivery and return to the truck to reload/recharge.
I thought that was one of Amazon's proposed delivery drone schemes before it got a sad but sensibly justifiable veto over concerns of the air space being filled with a high volume of drones whom would constitute a real falling hazard from the base failure rate and an attractive nuisance by being small non-human "faceless" targets with goods.
Technically anybody right now could just shoot a poor Amazon delivery drivers with a shotgun now to rob them but it would be murder as opposed to destruction of property. Very few would do so vs snaring or shooting a drone. It is one hell of a bizzare systemic perverse incentive - putting a human body to be at risk reduces the robbery incentive and frequency. Reminds me of one account of Italian medieval cities of merchants plastering their walls with the Virgin Mary so people wouldn't dare to blasphemously piss on her image.
For this even if you automate the driving and package delivery you would still want a human to be onsite to make sure the system doesn’t fail. It would make the amount of delivery trucks smaller making shipments more efficient .
> It is one hell of a bizzare systemic perverse incentive
Not to worry... Drones are corporate property and corporations are people, therefore destroying the drone is murder. Don't agree? Take it up with these heavily armed protection drones we built for the delivery drones.
And yet, the handler stops biting me when I stop resisting.
I love dogs, but think their time in LE are fading. Both as an affront to the rights of the people and of the dogs. The 'beast of burden' ethic is quickly becoming outdated.
That's exactly the idea. Drones are relatively energy-efficient and are ill-suited for long range transport, specially if they have to haul a package. But for "last mile" delivery it might make sense.
Mercedes-Benz built a demo where the "package bus" stops , little robots spread out, and do multiple deliveries nearby. You need dense deliveries for that to work, so it was never deployed.
I've had that thought as well.. basically driver takes a truck/trailer and parks, drones swarm and deliver packages within an N mile radius and come back to the truck... driver moves to next deploy point.
Of course the size/weight of some packages delivered via amazon would be an issue in terms of using a drone at all. Not sure about the energy use for flying drones... Land based drones could also work for some deliveries.
Well, I could certainly see in a city where a driver unloads a palette of vehicular drones at an office building which then distribute themselves.
However, this is likely another one of those "the exceptions are the norm" problems where the exceptional cases (long packages, unusual elevators, etc.) happen so often that it's just better to keep a human in the loop.
Counterpoint: Yesterday's useless robotic dog [0] is... today's useless robotic dog [1]. I've been working on various autonomous robotic technologies long enough with no visible progress that it's starting to feel like vaporware to me.
It's too early to make the prediction with certainty, but I won't be at all surprised if 20 years from now "autonomous delivery drone" is right up there with flying cars and nuclear fusion on the "20 more years" shelf.
Do delivery cars, scooters, trucks not produce noise? Is this a complaint about delivery drones or delivery? Tracking technology will always be at our fingertips. I don't think you'd want a world where that wasn't true. It's governmental regulation that's the answer to large scale abuse.
> Do delivery cars, scooters, trucks not produce noise?
There are a lot of existing laws about aircraft noise that cars, trucks and scooters don't need to worry about. And once you reach a certain number of takeoffs and landings your "airport" falls under additional regulations that require things like permanent noise monitoring and paying money for noise abatement for nearby property owners.
In my state, any citizen can file a public nuisance suit for unreasonable noise that interferes with quality of life. With trucks, cars and scooters it is perhaps a little difficult to track and attribute noise sources. One company making thousands of drone deliveries makes for a very easy target.
A delivery truck can transport half a dozen cubic meters or hundreds of kilograms of packages with ease. Replacing it with drones increases the noise level quite a bit.
What about an Uber Eats scooter? Also, a drone can be a last mile delivery method, where the very heavy truck ends up doing relatively long runs for single small packages.
Instead of replacing Uber Eats scooters with even louder drones, how about we replace them with silent eletric scooters, or bicycles? This can be done today, without any new technology or additional safety concerns.
How about we replace these sctooers with local eateries/restaurants/cafeterias which you walk to, meet people at, and eat locally-produced, locally-sourced food?
1. Complaining is a national sport in many countries... I'd probably be doing a lot of complaining myself - but I would have a community context in which to complain.
2. I didn't say there would be micro-farms and micro-ranches. I don't believe in "village-level" autarchy. But in my view there should be much less ferrying of food from halfway across the world because people work there for a couple of USD per day and ship fuel is (still) cheap.
3. My point was that it's a huge waste of social resources, not to mention fuel, to send out vehicles across town to deliver food. It's also part of a process of social atomization where more and more of our interactions are mediated and modulated by impersonal commercial processes.
I tend to agree. Those little two-cycle scooters howling down the road at like 110dB are just terrible. Way beyond any reasonable definition of acceptable.
> I don't think you'd want a world where that wasn't true.
Again, I'm speechless at the level of indoctrination. It is for my own good!
I'll be working on my next business idea. A shower head with an invisible camera that streams to the manufacturer for the protection of the shower user. After all, he might slip and the device could call an ambulance.
The shower head could monitor if the user is overweight and send some weight-loss ads. It is for the user's own good!
Also, I'll make it opt-out, and the opt-out process will be in a shrink wrap license.
You're too quick on the trigger. Going from a smart device to a smart device that tracks is technologically trivial. If you consider that the problem, you'll end up retreating to the 1800s. That's why I said that surveillance will always be "at our fingertips". I don't think that mass surveillance is for our own good. Why would I call it abuse if I though it were?
It's the idea that you can opt out, but the process is not simple or advertised. It will probably involve a notary, registered post and a fax of your government-issued ID.
drones make a much more annoying sound than most vehicles. closest comparison I can think of is a dirtbike. imagine how irritating it would be if deliveries were made via dirtbike at scale.
Isn't this a perennial complaint? Didn't the invention of cell phones come to pollute our lives with more noise than ever before? Yet we tolerated it, because of the benefits and desire of people to use them.
Every technology goes through a period of societal decision whether to tolerate the downsides (even very broadly distributed, vague downsides) compared to the benefits created.
Easy: because every so often one of those new inventions become multi-billion dollar industries.
Some techs suck because they just need refinement/people aren't used to them, and some are just bad ideas. It's hard to tell in advance so people bet on all sorts of things.
I've been joking for awhile now that UPS/FedEx trucks could become 'aircraft carriers', carrying a set of drones along with the packages, using the drones for the 'last mile' of delivery.
Joking aside when Amazon's drone program first made news I thought they were going to make a deal with USPS to use the gazillion post office offices as drone bases. Guess it never went anywhere.
USPS is legally blocked from offering any services besides postal services, one of the reasons they're doing so bad among many, and this seems vaguely delivery but outside the bounds.
That’s not true at all. USPS offers notary services, passport services, money orders, and many other services besides.
The reason USPS is having financial troubles is because conservative extremists in the American government have put huge financial burdens on them like fully funding their medical plan 10 years in advance in a blatant attempt at bankrupting one of the few Federal agencies specifically enumerated in the Constitution so they can then sell this services to FedEx and UPS and make huge gains for shareholders.
It's actually a requirement to fund 75 years of retirement costs in 10 years ($75 billion).
And it was passed with broad bipartisan support. I wish people would stop repeating the canard about "conservative extremists" with respect to this law.
> But the 2006 law also shifted the burden of paying for worker and retiree benefits entirely to the Postal Service. That came at the insistence of the Bush administration, Davis said.
Davis being the congressman who introduced the bill.
There's a lot of stuff in the PAEA bill that put that obligation on the USPS, just because the whole bill passed with support from both parties doesn't mean that the particular prepaid debt obligation isn't the work of "conservative extremists" the history of particular provisions is important. A lot of otherwise objectionable provisions get included at the threat of a filibuster from ideological groups.
How many of the packages are smaller than a shoebox? How many are lighter than 5 pounds? Could drones doing this from a specialized place on top of the van save you some stops?
That's exactly what patent US9305280B1 [0] from Amazon describes!
I personally think this could work particularly well, maybe not with blimps but with trucks doing optimized routes and deploying drones for the last mile.
If the drones spend a decent amount of time on the truck it doesn't need anything too exotic. You will need to outfit the trucks with beefy alternators/gensets though.
There are still several issues with this scheme. The drone needs to be autonomous enough to know when to take off, which partially involves knowing the trucks current and future route information. It also needs to be able to navigate safely in low level flight to the destination, and be able to safely drop the package off. The original prototype delivery required homeowners to build a small helipad in their back yard to get packages, which is impractical. The drone then needs to be able to fly back to the truck, knowing exactly where the truck is and where it will be in a few minutes and possibly land on a moving vehicle with enough precision to hook up the charging system and somehow select and attach the next package for delivery.
When you look into the details this is a horrendously complex system. Some of the tech isn't really there yet and the rest requires a whole elephant load of integration and testing. There are loads of things that can go wrong. The truck might get diverted around roadwork, or be in an accident, or there could be kids playing in the yard when the drone arrives with the package and nowhere safe to land, territorial birds may attack the drone, or the battery pack on the drone might fail and catch fire, a no-fly NOTAM may appear suddenly over your delivery area, or so on and so forth.
Imagine a world in which we don't need individual cars, because public transport is sufficient; passengers and cargo are pooled into compartments; compartments pooled and unpooled mid-trip as needed to maximize total efficiency; where traffic runs underground and on a rail where that makes sense; where stations can be very large or very small based on traffic; where the economics of laying out the tunnels is such that it makes sense to build small stations; where car roads are a rarity; where safety is not relient on human judgment, skill or reaction time; where transportation is not dependent on fossil fuels. Aah, those things are pleasant to imagine.
Or, Imagine where we toll everyone daily who get's on a highway in a car, and instead provide sheltered lanes for bicycles. And those bikes are simple sturdy steel bikes with wire cage panniers and can hold a ton. And in this utopian world a lot of health related issues are reduced because of the incidental exercise that people get on commuting around.
I mean, it is cheaper but it's not that cheap. There was recently a post here showing very clearly that for example in Germany electricity is so expensive that a good diesel car beats it in terms of cost easily. Even here in the UK if I were to charge at public points it would again be cheaper to just drive a diesel. It only becomes cheaper when I charge at home with a good tariff.
Besides, seeing as our roads are exclusively maintained from fuel taxes, I cannot see this going on forever - the government will have to find a way to tax the electricity going into electric cars somehow.
Sounds evil-ish, but how about gasoline tax paying for electric car recharge? Electric cars being very expensive to buy is a problem though. You'd end up subsidising those who are already wealthy.
I mean the car I have(volvo phev) currently has a deal where Volvo pays me back for the 1st year of electricity used by the car, they do it by having the car automatically upload the number of kWh used to Volvo servers, then they will pay me back based on the number of kWh I've used during that year.
I don't see why something similar couldn't be done for taxes - the car keeps track of kWh used and you just pay tax based on how much you used. Obviously, that runs into certain immediate problems - like, what if you drive abroad? Normally you'd simply buy fuel while abroad, so therefore contribute to taxes there - but with this system this wouldn't work anymore.
Maybe a GPS and pay-per-km-driven scheme would be more tamper proof. You can spoof a GPS as well, but it can be double-checked automatically by state traffic cams.
Gas tax doesn't stop car dependence. In LA one gas station might be two dollars more a gallon than another one 5 blocks down the road (not due to tax, I'm really not sure why this happens), and both are packed with customers during rush hour. If you are well off enough where you can afford to pay >$5 a gallon without thinking about it, no reasonable tax is going to change your behavior. These people sitting in traffic 5 days a week in these black Mercedes luxury-safari-imperialist SUVs wouldn't care if gas was $15 a gallon.
I suggest you look for more than just arthritis related information. The amount of mechanical wear it causes is significant over time.
That is not to say it doesn't have benefits but to suggest the entire population can haul their arse on a bike doing a 20mi round trip every day for 40 years and be hopping along nicely is a dream.
Not to mention the incidental injuries of which my colleagues suffer from, and myself going back a few years (hospital wasn't much fun)
No, come on, provide something concrete. Searching for "cycling joint wear" just provides unreliable sources saying you don't use your joints up, but it doesn't provide unreliable (or reliable) sources saying the opposite.
It is easy to avoid incidental injuries, and everyone would much rather the trauma of an incidental cycling accident than the trauma of a highspeed car crash. Mentioning them in just scaremongering. Ride at a safe speed on a proper path and look where your going. If you can't look where you're going, you're going too fast; slow down. (You can't say "proper paths don't exist", because we're talking about the dreamland in which they do, therefore, by definition, they do.)
20 mi round trips are unlikely. You get long trips in cities developed for cars.
This is 20th century nonsense that has been debunked. Your body is not a battery that you use up, use means regeneration. Not using your joints for strength production is more harmful than biking everywhere.
> Imagine a world in which we don't need individual cars, because public transport is sufficient
This is already true when you augment public transport with bike lanes, cheap or public bicycles, and slow narrow vehicles for the movement-impaired which can go on bike lanes.
... that is, in many cities in the world, especially in Europe. The Netherlands is particularly good in this respect.
Just imaging, every car has a landing platform on the roof. A centralized traffic system knows the destination of each car. Drones can just jump cars, and if there is no car going in the right direction, lift off and finish the rest of route themselves.
The first stepping stone is probably drones based on UPS and FedEx trucks helping by making small package deliveries while the driver is dropping off packages in each neighborhood.
One could imagine you could sign up just by opting in on your navigation app.
However, I think practically speaking, I don't want the roof of my car damaged, so there would have to be some capital cost to create some kind of roof protector landing pad thing. So that might limit adoption.
On the other hand, if I drove a pickup truck, I wouldn't care. I would opt in without any changes to my vehicle. I would just need to make sure the bed is empty.
I'm still holding out hope for ballistic delivery from UP/Ex launchers, as envisioned by Vernor Vinge in Rainbow's End. A solid fling and a guided parachute might actually work. Major airspace sharing concerns, of course.
>as envisioned by Vernor Vinge in Rainbow's End. A solid fling and a guided parachute might actually work. Major airspace sharing concerns, of course.
No need to go that high at least initially or even use parachutes. Just mount your system that lobs packages on a truck. It just drives a route and some software lobs everything where/when needed. Use a special sticker that's reflective in a particular spectrum for the truck to target and give the stickers out for free. Have the truck scan for the stickers, record gps coordinates (so you know which addresses are deliverable with your new system) and scan for obstacles so you can compute potential firing angle (too low and you're in the shrubs, too high and you're in the power lines or tree branches) as it drives around. Once you know the potential firing arcs for a supported address you can calculate what packages can be delivered without going too high/low or over/under shooting. Even if the truck has to stop to shoot it's still a labor saving improvement over traditional delivery and the sound of a low pressure pneumatic cannon isn't any louder than a truck door. You could use existing warehouse infrastructure to make sure that packages that are not of the right density (or are market in your system as too fragile)to safely toss don't wind up getting tossed.
You're basically just using software and data input to replace the judgement of the paper boy (hard) and some powered rollers and actuators to replace his arm hard (easy).
Disclaimer: I spend 3min thinking about this, this is by no means a serious pitch.
So basically a giant t-shirt cannon for compatible deliveries.
I can definitely agree with the theory behind it. Pair autonomous systems with delivery trucks and let them deliver easy packages (light weight, non-fragile) and let them deliver from the truck to harder addresses (long driveway, up a flight up steps in a breezeway) or deliver ahead.
in the high power rocketry hobby it can be a very long walk ( over a mile ) to retrieve your rocket after a parachute landing. Here's a GPS guided parachute that fly's back to the launch pad. I don't believe it made it to production but it's very cool
I wonder if you could use a retrieval drone (depending on the size of the rocket). Either by remote control or GPS on the rocket, fly over to pick up the rocket with some kind of mechanical claw.
This is a terrible idea. Taxpayers pay for the fuel in that bus, the maintenance of that bus, and the roads it rides on. We’re not funding that so Jeff Bezos can add another hundred million to his pocket tax free. This is bullshit. If delivery companies want to profit off the public transportation system, they should be paying into said system. Especially if their new plan to deliver their goods is designed to undermine and circumvent the US Postal Service, another taxpayer funded delivery system.
Your objection seems to be based on an implicit assumption that the drones would ride for free. I don't see any reason to believe it would happen that way. What public transit agency would ever agree to that?
To me, it seems like a more reasonable assumption is that the drone operators would pay the transit agencies money. Since the buses are already going on those routes, the marginal cost for the transit agency should be nearly zero, so it should be easy to make a profit.
So this seems like a good way for transit agencies to increase their funding with little downside.
>This is bullshit. If delivery companies want to profit off the public transportation system, they should be paying into said system
Okay, "nodrones123," if the companies paid for this, do you now approve? Or is this just the first in a litany of complaints that will be rolled out whack-a-mole style?
Bike couriers will be paying when they hop on bus. Drone operators also have to consider how to pay, of course after evaluating if this approach is legal in the first place.
I don't understand why the default assumption is that delivery drones need to fly. It seems like you could have a bus-ful of small wheeled drones that could achieve many of the benefits with much fewer safety concerns.
Would need to make a package lockbox similar to a mailbox that is accessible by the dronecars, but I think in this day and age of frequent package theft, many would go along with it.
>Would need to make a package lockbox similar to a mailbox that is accessible by the dronecars
at this point, you can almost get rid of the whole last-mile problem that you're trying to solve with the drones, and the delivery truck can just drop off pre-filled lockboxes roadside.
I do wonder if drone delivery will take off (heh). A lot has been said about the disadvantages, but one also has to also wonder about the advantages.
There's a point at which things are "good enough", and small improvements aren't really worth the costs. How much time would using drones for the last couple kilometers save? A few hours? Local delivery trucks tend to make rounds every day, so it really does seem like the maximum amount of time drone delivery could save is one day.
Will the cost of operating this (not only monetary, but also organizational, and in terms of noise pollution, drone repair, the occasional package/drone lost, etc) be worth the whole one day faster delivery to customers?
This, especially considering drones can't deliver everything, so trucks would have to keep operating. Truck's are large— economically what makes sense is to have them full of packages and with a whole-day schedule. Would drone usage offset enough deliveries to cut a few truck routes? Would they be enough to make it all worth?
This is more about route finding than anything else. One hour of CPU time to calculate routes for 5000 packages and 30 distribution centers. That's pretty good.
Or, run special carts up and down main drags for drones to hitch rides (and perhaps charge while riding?). Instead of combining them with human transport, to the detriment of both humans and drones.
When I saw the title, I thought this was brilliant! But I thought they meant a "drone" more like these: https://www.starship.xyz/. (Turns out google responds better to searching for robots when looking those up). A ground robot would alleviate a lot of the concerns about noise and other problems with urban air travel.
Ok,this is sort of brilliant in it's simplicity and ability to use existing resources. A while back i read an article that theorized that there would be cars all over carrying drones and cars would do most of the transportation while the drones did the last mile or so. Here is a practical example.
but remember that "taking into account" does not necessarily mean "make impossible".
yes, humans can attack drones. but humans can also attack postal carriers, or steal packages off porches. neither of those facts seem to be disqualifiers for continuing with the current system. Some level of theft will always happen, and the cost of that theft needs to be factored into the overall cost of the system. if that cost is too high, it can make the system untenable, but eliminating the possibility of theft is not a realistic goal for any delivery system.
> if that cost is too high, it can make the system untenable
That's what I mean. If postal service workers and their trucks get abducted / stolen once every 10-20 deliveries then that would make the postal delivery system untenable as well. :D
It's a little bit apples to oranges here. While in the classic systems you can only get the good stolen, here we're talking stealing the good and the delivery system with it.
(This of course is ignoring what happens if something fucks up and suddenly it has 1/8th of a second to decide to fly out of it or brake those giant swinging carbon fiber blades before they encounter human flesh. It's like a trolley problem on a trolley.).
No way. (IMHO of course)
(e.g
Video of a Matrice 600 with a payload of ~8lbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jayVMmvLxOA
Even better, 25 lbs from 60' up lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jULQrdUTngM
)