Amazon announced using drones in 2014. In pop culture, drone delivery is like an assumed common practice. Yet fucking nobody gets their packages delivered by drone. It’s been over a decade.
These robots are vaporware. Amazon will get a stock bump and that’s the whole point.
Yeah, humans regularly deliver stuff wrong on our street. There is no way robots will manage. I get packages for both by neighbours and they get mine more often than correct deliveries and one of my neighbours is a business.
At my old workplace we ended up getting like a thousand toilet seats delivered to us. We were a web publishing firm.
Perhaps it wasn’t an accident… 😂
Stop redirecting them. Make it cost them.
Tell your neighbors to file an “it arrived late” or “it didn’t arrive” complaint. Get two and send one back. Their fault for being shit companies.
If something is delivered to you by mistake, it’s not your responsibility to fix the mistake, you just got free stuff.
If it goes through USPS, it might be a federal offense to open stuff delivered via USPS, but is that true of third party parcel delivery? Almost certainly not, because USPS is a government org and those third party shit delivery companies aren’t…
So now any package that’s delivered to me by anyone other than USPS… it’s mine now, and I open it to see if I want whatever trash my neighbors are buying.
I used to try to fix the problem… but then I realized it’s NOT MY PROBLEM.
What makes you think you can’t have individualized instructions for harder to reach addresses? After the first failure it’s pretty trivial to go out and fix it. Google does far more work maintaining maps and directions services.
Vs having a new delivery guy get confused every other week?
What you just described is humans causing the issue, drone delivery would absolutely solve your problem.
The drone’s only as good as its software, the map it’s using, and the address data it’s given. All of which were created by fallible humans.
Ain’t it fun having turtles all the way down?
43.9454776, -123.5393014
^ no address, GPS is very very precise.
When you order something, do you express where you want it sent in coordinates or as an address? You can’t assume that the device’s coordinates at the time the order is made correspond to where the order is supposed to be sent, even if the device gives coordinates. Plus, they’re either not precise enough (could encompass the yard of the house next door, or just the snowbank at the edge of the property) or too precise (“drop this in the center of the roof because that’s where the coordinates are”). You’d need software capable of parsing building layouts well enough to figure out where the main entryway is and leave the parcel there, or you’d have to require that people interested in receiving deliveries by drone put a beacon where they want the drone to drop stuff.
Beacons are the simplest solution, but they immediately put Amazon in a position where most people won’t care enough to set them up.
Even as pitched, you still have to print out a QR code and staple it to your front lawn for every package. Presumably, they want you to be home for it since it’s dropped out in the open and might bounce into the street.
Amazon’s drone delivery is trash, you’re correct. But eventually it will be significantly better than humans, input gps location and the product will be at that exact location give or take 1 foot
Take a look at ziplines upcoming drone delivery service for instance, it will be significantly better than Amazon’s and will be way better than a human delivery driver.
eventually
It’s been ten fucking years. They are one of the top five companies in the world. What are we waiting for here?
All of the investors that originally paid into the idea have already made their money. There is no reason to continue the project.
Can you point to deliveries that actually use any of that?
Down voted for the obvious observation. A drone just needs to get explicit instructions ones a report is filled and it won’t be an issue. Google does more work on Google maps IMO.
That’s a great point. Where are all those delivery drones? Lol
You are wise
Amazon just rolled out their first production drone delivery SSD site in Phoenix. It’s sorta shit though.
Zipline is way more interesting and I cant wait for them to go live in my area.
Airspace rules are a huge factor there. I see delivery robots on the sidewalk often enough though.
I suspect most companies are still waiting out the testing and waiting for costs to be reduced.
Companies like Amazon would do anything. Except paying living wages
Yep.
Remember that hitch hiking robot that made it across Canada but only made it to New Jersey (started in NYC) in America? These will 100% get the same treatment everywhere on earth.
Not only Canada, but also Japan and Europe.
The main difference is that these robots kind of deserve it. Not “personally” but for what they represent.
That is how you get to be this big.
Wanna bet its 7000 Indian workers again?
Package delivery simulator, pre-order on steam
Evil genius level right here
just like thier shop and go stores, were mostly india controlled. probably 70k indias.
Anything to avoid one of the richest people in the world paying his employees a livable wage.
Bro that is so gonna get HitchBot’ed
a photo was tweeted, showing that the robot had been stripped “beyond repair” and decapitated in Philadelphia. The robot was located by some people following its progress on its website. The head was never found.
Also, like… if you wanna replace human workers, fine, just give us the UBI.
Otherwise, riots would be justified.
as someone who has spent time living in Philly what were they THINKING lmfao
Just one shitty makeshift EMP and that thing is toast.
I imagine they will scale back robot design and just throw from the truck.
…okay, I really want to know the story behind that picture!
I’m gonna say CGI. Arm isn’t mounted to the floor (I can tell by the pixels), no cables going to the arm, holding the bowling ball like that is extremely unsafe.
Gif compression definitely makes it look more believable, I remember falling for this the first time I saw it
“…creation of motion graphics designer Tom Coben…” https://mashable.com/video/bowling-robot-video-computer-generated
Nice, thanks!
Amazon 1 year after launch: Unfortunately, the space needed for robots in the van means that the van has to return to base 5 times more often to reload with the actual packages and the extra weight of robots more than doubles the weight of the van being lugged around in the form of heavy robots. So that’s why we are having to charge more for delivery and why it is taking longer for you to get your packages. But at least we can pay fewer salaries.
Also we don’t pay taxes but will fuck up the roads with the extra weight. Good luck driving over potholes suckers!
That is still better for both the environment and safety than everyone going to the store seperately in their own car. (Transit or walking of course are still better yet).
Why is that the comparison, though? Sears developed mail-order catalogues in the 1800s. That’s what Amazon replaced.
I can’t wait to throw a Faraday blanket over one of these and jtag some open source firmware on it. What do you mean steal? I didn’t steal anything, I just repurposed some garbage left on my front step!
I’d be terrified if that thing showed up at my door.
Better keep a big furnace full of molten steel ready just in case.
👍
brb popping out to get that right now
Gallium would do
I’d be very glad and a bit richer
The robot then encounters the entirely unpredictable American rural south
staircases half busted up surrounded by weeds and gravel roads full of holes
robots fucked with by kids who are now tying it to a tree with bungie cords for fun
one being dragged off in the background by a dude with a welding mask on
wageslave.exe has encountered an internal exception and must close
Wonder how much copper is wired up in those things
I’m pretty sure it will be a valuable amount of copper.
Edit: Except of course I guess it won’t, because they’re just bullshitting to drum up invetor interest, and only three of these will ever exist.
Ea-nasir strikes again!
I tend to disbelieve this, mainly because a humanoid robot would be overkill. Custom-purpose robots would be much cheaper to design, build and maintain, with fewer potential failure points.
Eh I dunno there’s so much infrastructure that is human centric; if you could make a humanoid robot it could easily traverse all the human designed places
The main problem is walking on unpredictable terrain, which spidery or doggy robots can do with fewer balance issues than two-legged humanoid ones.
Like what… stairs?
Just leave the package at the bottom of the stairs like humans do.
Also doors and gates
They may also have concluded that the public finds a humanoid robot more acceptable than those cube 4-wheeled robots that never took off that people like to tip and kick over and stuff
You don’t really need to be humanoid to manipulate ddmoors and gates
Be funny if hackers hacked them to kill CEOs.
Amazon still can’t even figure out how to reliably get human drivers door passcodes into an apartment building, and then into its mail/package locker room.
The map system it uses for telling drivers how to get around a city to make deliveries is also garbage, can’t account for traffic, punishes people for using faster side routes to get to the same place, tells you to park in areas that either have no parking at all, or where parking there would majorly disrupt traffic, or assumes available street parking will always exist in places and times it almost never does.
I once did an Amazon delivery gig where they booked me in for the time slot, I get to the FC, after waiting an hour they tell half of us: ‘oops we booked too many drivers, so today you all get $200 for showing up and doing nothing, go home now’
???
Update: It is day 126 and Amazon still can’t figure out where my camera is.
I know where it is. Their delivery driver stole it. (Yes, I just charged back my credit card. Their response was to send me an incredibly smarmy and condescending form email asking why, as if they don’t already know. And they lost the chargeback dispute, obviously.)
So maybe their robots won’t steal your package. They’ll just yeet it into a bush 65536 yards from your house in a random direction instead. On the bright side, you might occasionally get a package that belongs to someone else from the other side of town dropped on your lawn.
To both this and that I say no thanks; I don’t use Amazon anymore.
Amazon sent my next door neighbour a photograph of my back garden indicating they delivered the package. In the photo you can see my door with the obviously wrong house number.
Happens, I’d bet money it was a multi-location stop and they were intending to deliver that neighbor’s package and accidentally grabbed yours. It’s easy to make a mistake here and there when you’re delivering to thousands of houses in a given week.
I just love the fact that he had to open three gates in order to get to my garden. But couldn’t be bothered to check the address.
or assumes available street parking will always exist in places and times it almost never does.
That explains all the amazon vans parked in the middle of the fucking street.
Yep!
Drivers have to visit an absolutely absurd number of locations in a small block of time, so if they attempt to park like a sane member of society, they’ll be fired very quickly.
They’ll be vandalised almost immediately.
I prefer the term “beautified”.
are you promoting vandalism?
I’m not promoting anything, but art is art.
Non-consentually arbitraged
everyone knows its just going to be indians in a data center in india controlling the bots.
