rigorousintuition.ca

Drones have already been used to deliver packages and cakes in China and beer at a South African music festival, Domino's Pizza also released a video earlier this year suggesting that one of its U.K. franchises was experimenting with drones for pizza delivery.

DrEvil » Mon Dec 02, 2013 12:26 pm wrote:1. BB-gun
2. ???
3. Free Stuff!

But Amazon’s drones face some similar challenges. The big two:

Delivery drones can explode, or run into things. Unmanned drones are guided by not-always reliable GPS and equipped with metal-bladed propellers and batteries that may be prone to combustion. They’re likely to be impossible to use in many urban areas or anywhere near flight paths for commercial planes. “You’re never going to see them until they hit something. When they suck one of those drones into the engine of an airplane, then it’ll get everybody’s attention,” a former Continental Airlines pilot told ABC news earlier this year.

Commercial drone use won’t be approved for years. Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos has admitted the 2015 timeline is “optimistic” and it could be four or five years before regulations are in place, according to a recent interview with Charlie Rose. That may still be too hopeful. Despite pressure from companies and a law passed in 2012 to push commercialization of the technology, full blown certification of drones “isn’t slated to start until 2020,” judging by the aviation regulator’s early guidelines on drone testing, the Wall Street Journal reported in this Nov. 7 article. Test sites are expected to be announced this month, but decisions could be delayed because of privacy concerns.

So, what do Bezos and Amazon get out of the announcement, besides some skeptical publicity and a rash of “What could go wrong” jokes on Twitter? By making such a public splash, the company is practically guaranteed a place at the table in any future US discussions of commercial drone regulation. And when Amazon is viewed less as an online retailer and more as a company with “boundless ambition,” as one former employee put it, and one that wants to build the infrastructure of the internet economy over the long term, being a leader in drone delivery could be seen as a key part of Amazon’s future strategy.

For now, though, the US Postal Service, DHL, UPS and FedEx are certain to employ plenty of real-live humans for many years to come.

DRONENET The next BIG thing.

Here's the next BIG thing. Something that has the potential to be as big as the Internet.

It's one of those ideas that hits you like a ton of bricks once you figure it out.

Given the rise in the entrepreneurial backchatter I'm getting on it, I supect it's going to roll out very quickly.

More quickly than most people think once it gets going, since most of the infrastructure required to put it into motion is already in place.

What is it?

It's an Internet of drones.

A short distance drone delivery service built on an open protocol. Think short haul logistics.

It's a system that will explode in a way that is very similar to the way the Internet grew up -- where connections were bought by individuals and installed one modem and IP address at a time, and where the early providers are local geeks with shelves full of modems and an expensive T-1 lines.

It's an approach that uses "uncontrolled airspace" and incremental purchases of cheap, standards compliant pads/drones to roll itself out (very similar to the way the Internet was able to piggy back on the old telephone system).

As a result of this open approach and decentralization, it's something that could grow VERY fast.


Here's a simplified version of what I'm talking about:

-I put package onto a landing pad at my home.
-Drone arrives, takes package and flies away.
-Drone delivers package to landing pad at delivery location.

There's almost nothing technically in the way of this happening right now.

Here's how it would work in practice:

-My brother left his iphone at my house. I want to get it to him, but he lives 30 mi away (as the crow flies, 50 by driving).
-I put it into a delivery container and put it on a small landing pad outside my home.
-I order a drone on my phone and put the ID of the container into the order (I could just as easily use a drone I buy to do it P2P).
-A drone arrives 10 minutes later, picks up the container automatically.
-After a couple of hops, it arrives at my brother's landing pad, where it drops off the container and alerts him with an e-mail/text.
-Costs? Probably less than $0.25 per 10 mi. or so. So, about $0.75 in this instance. Time? An hour or so.


How cool is that? Now add millions of drones and millions of landing pads, interconnecting with each other according to simple rules and decentralized ownership.

There's lots more to this, and I'll try to share it when I get a chance.

Hope you enjoy this heads up.

Our Vision

We are creating the next paradigm for transportation using a network of unmanned aerial vehicles.

We will bring to the world its next-generation transportation system.

A system that’s the lowest cost, lowest energy, lowest ecological footprint, most easy to set up, most easy to reconfigure, requiring the least upfront infrastructure investment than any other system we’ve ever created.

A system that can work in any environment, in the least and the most extreme landscapes and in most weather.

A system that can reach anyone, anywhere.

A system that creates opportunities and unlocks access.

Matternet Manifesto

We founded Matternet on the belief that we should take the most advanced technology where it’s needed most. It’s our fundamental belief that technological solutions will evolve faster and better where the need is most extreme.

Doing good is our first priority. There is strong value associated with doing good in the world and we are moving into an era when this will be appreciated as the prime objective after decades of technological innovation driven solely by the desire to make money.

As humanity continues to destabilize the global environment, the moments of global human crisis that face us will challenge the fragile systems of infrastructure that have been defined by our past will need to be augmented by smart agile systems of the future.

We feel like we’re constantly evolving our own category. When we started no-one was talking about the positive value of drones. Today, there’s plenty of players in the ‘drones for good’ business which makes us happy. We’re not just in the drone business, because that would have been like being in the hardware business and not the internet, the software and connected service creates long term value.

The inception point for Matternet was an observation that communities that can neither afford or sustain road infrastructure should leapfrog the accepted paradigm to build an infrastructure that redefines the next-generation of transportation systems. Today the solution is drones, tomorrow it could be desktop factories or dematerialization.

So we designed Matternet to connect drones to every possible fulfillment service, creating a federated infrastructure that realizes the full potential of the internet. We want to bring fulfillment to where need exists rather than where roads end. The beauty of UAVs is no physical infrastructure. UAVs fly wherever there is air, and air paths can be authorized. It’s dematerialised infrastructure. It’s software infrastructure.

Fundamentally we want to create a network that is designed around human need, rather than the limitations of the antiquated technology that formed our current transportation system.

And because we are able to sense need at the speed of the internet we can update the inventory of matter that can fulfill that need at the speed of the internet. Fulfilling this need quickly becomes simply about connecting this ‘need node’ to the closest location of available resource.

The matternet is finite resource networked to the awareness of need, serviced by an adaptive delivery mechanism. It is a net(work) for matter and will do to atoms, what the internet did to information.