[robomartin]

> I get it isn't perfect but it's impossible to eliminate all risk.

I don't think I said that anywhere in my comment. You are stating an obvious fact of life.

> I think we should be evaluating drone failure within the scope of the wider picture. If drone accidents are less likely and deadly than motor vehicle accidents (including lives lost to pollution) then we should probably press ahead with them even if the technology isn't perfect because we'll be saving more lives overall.

Good luck with that.

[rcarr]

> I get it isn't perfect but it's impossible to eliminate all risk.

>> I don't think I said that anywhere in my comment. You are stating an obvious fact of life.

Your original comment implied it's too expensive to be worth undertaking and I just don't think that's the case unless we're letting perfect be the enemy of good.

> I think we should be evaluating drone failure within the scope of the wider picture. If drone accidents are less likely and deadly than motor vehicle accidents (including lives lost to pollution) then we should probably press ahead with them even if the technology isn't perfect because we'll be saving more lives overall.

>> Good luck with that.

Well we have lots of traffic accident data and there are also lots of studies on estimated deaths due to pollution. It would not be difficult to get early data in pilot studies of these drones, extrapolate it and compare it with the traffic and pollution studies.

[robomartin]

> Your original comment implied it's too expensive to be worth undertaking

No. That's not what I said. Quoting:

"outside of aerospace/military applications is that FT designs can get very expensive, very quickly. It can be hard to justify some of the design decisions one might have to make in the context of low cost commercial products. This is the main issue with drones."

In a commercial environment you have real financial boundaries. If the acceptable cost range for a drone is in the order of $100K, nobody is going to pay $500K for one. A drone with aircraft-grade certification and failure tolerance can easily cost that much; even more.

It isn't a matter of "too expensive to be worth undertaking" --a statement that can easily be twisted into something about not caring enough about human lives, etc. That isn't the point. At all.

Delivering a package costs X. Nobody is going to pay ten times X for the same delivery. Why? Because there are excellent deliver services that will do the job for X, if not less. And so, the financial equation regulating the acceptable cost range of a drone-based operation is related to what the market is willing to accept. This, in turn, determines what type of engineering one can apply to the drones.

It's simple, really. Commercial products are bound by constraints imposed by the market. If you are not willing to pay $75 for a cheeseburger, the burger-joint employees cannot make $50 per hour. It's impossible. It isn't necessarily a question of it not being worth it (paying them that much). Not at all. The market will not support it. You just can't do it.

> extrapolate it and compare it with the traffic and pollution studies.

Name one product. A single commercial or industrial product. Whose design safety requirements were determines and actually implemented by evaluating deaths due to pollution as a decision-making metric.

It's nice to talk about these things, and you might have a fantastic idea. Yet, once we descend to the realities of this world, well, as I said, good luck. Not going to happen. That's just not how things work. Perhaps they should. Not today. Not anytime soon.