Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by fidotron 448 days ago
Ground effect vehicles could be the thing that's needed to make drone based delivery a reasonable thing to do, especially around lakes. It's one of life's perennial disappointments that such things only get done in military terms and under the ludicrous notion they are rescue vessels.
2 comments
nradov 448 days ago
That's never going to happen. Only a tiny fraction of the population live directly on lakeshores, and basically no warehouses. If drone based delivery is going to work then they'll have to fly out of ground effect to avoid structures and trees.

The main advantage of ground effect vehicles is lower fuel consumption over long distances. That's not a priority for the short range battery powered drones used by delivery services.

link
lawlessone 448 days ago
>Only a tiny fraction of the population live directly on lakeshores,

I think you are mistaken sir.

I live by a lake myself and i've just talked to my neighbors, and they all live by a lake too.

link
throwway120385 447 days ago
My startup is working on playing soothing music on drones using differential timing of rotor speeds. We've made some impressive inroads in the past few years. We're planning on adding a model that also plays birdsong for exactly this use case in the next couple of years!
link
m4rtink 447 days ago
I think drone based delivery is a solved problem by now, thanks to the very rapid developments in the last 2 years ?

Some of the drones are now even fiber optic guided and thus resistant to jamming by the competition!

link
tonyarkles 447 days ago
Lol depending on what you’re delivering and whether you want the aircraft back to fly a second mission or not.

For civilian drone delivery there are some use cases where you can squeeze out a small profit doing drone-based delivery as opposed to conventional truck-based delivery, but it’s not a sure thing yet in general. A Transit van can cover a huge number of miles for a relatively small capital investment. Covering the same number of miles with a drone (even factoring in that you aren’t constrained by the road network and can do straight line flights) for lower cost is… hard.

link