[jahewson]

The shields would themselves increase both drag and weight. It's probably very challenging to land on the back of a truck due to the airflow around the truck, it would require a drone which can withstand high winds, turbulent air, and has much more powerful motors to perform the mavouvre. That would increase the weight of the drone significantly, so you're unlikely to see energy savings.

[nwatson]

So the drones take off and land from a purpose-built shielded dock/recharger station only when the truck is at a stop light or designated real-time-determined rendezvous where the truck and the drone(s) have agreed to meet or un-meet while the truck is stopped.

And fuel consumption concerns are negligible. Sure, there likely would be a net increase in fuel used, but the premium is on drone electric charge capacity, battery weight, and drone range. A coordinated network of drones hopping onto trucks would greatly increase total per-drone range and make it possible to centralize drone freight depots even more (making them more sparsely distributed). This would push down costs a lot. The drone actually flies only "the last mile" and delivers only higher-valued goods.

[jahewson]

That's much more reasonable, landing on a stationary truck is obviously going to be straightforward and safe. It's still probably best to do it away from major roads though.

The fuel was never an issue, sure there's a net increase in fuel consumed but not a net increase in energy as the drone is less efficient than the truck at transporting the same load.

A "last mile" drone is a pretty good idea, not just because it increases range, but because it avoids the need for the for the drone to return to the depot after each delivery. On the other hand, if the deliveries are tightly clustered it might sill be more efficient to just deliver them using the truck, as drones waste a lot of energy working against gravity.

[e12e]

> That's much more reasonable, landing on a stationary truck is obviously going to be straightforward and safe. It's still probably best to do it away from major roads though.

Well, even crossing a highway with a large number of drones, is bound to lead to some of them failing and falling down into traffic? I suppose in some way there's some safety margin, having the drone do a controlled crash as soon as one engine fails -- but there must be scenarios in which the (presumably rather cheap) devices suffer sudden failure (eg: battery pack failure?).

[cbhl]

That suggests to me that we might get better gains with purpose-built drone trucks (think "aircraft carrier") rather than leveraging existing (e.g. UPS) trucks.

I also wonder whether delivery trucks are in and of themselves as prevalent in China as they are in America, versus, say, bicycle carriers or other forms of delivery.