Snatching would probably not be an issue. (Delivery guy would also give the "cargo" to anyone who claims he ordered it).
They also don't have to throw it though the window. You know to the second when the drone arrives and it can just hover until you open the window and take it. And it's your window, not someone elses. After 2 minutes, your lunch goes back and you got a bad point on your profile.
You would need to order to the right window and stuff, but you can build a window map of the city with drones. I think the hard part is regulation and licensing the airspace, not the technology.
Or imagine delivery of low-value goods to close locations.
At the moment it takes 30-60 minutes for a restaurant from 3 block away to deliver my lunch and it includes a bicycle, a delivery guy, an elevator guy and a couple of doors and/or doorbells. It costs a few dollars in tip.
A drone can bypass all of that inefficiency and show up in my window 60 seconds after the meal is cooked. In New York it could deliver to the fire escape or to a special landing pads, or just hover in front of the 3rd window on the left on the 5th floor for 30 seconds.
What happens to the illegal delivery guy living on the tip is an entirely different question.
Delivery trucks are hard to transport and store once they're reported stolen. It'd be more sensible to just steal the packages on the truck.
The drone is "small", can be transported and stored without it being visible, so it get's lots of points there. Also I'd be concerned about stupid people/assholes and the shiny new drone.
That said, Cameras+GPS, not to mention you don't want to steal the drone if it's delivering to you because it'd be kinda obvious.
Drones from the truck to the door would work, however. I could see the elimination of the driver walking the package to more of a drone operator to dump the package on the doorstep. Automation could queue it up so they could just put it in park and fly it... or even have remote operators picking up the package from a truck to the doorstep.
I'ld add that drone delivery for takeout would be a nice win, given that most restaurants that deliver are already limited to nearby locations and speed is desired.
With a proviso that it might be easier in a suburban situation to begin (given a lawn to drop off the goods).
Cities seem like the easiest challenge to tackle. Amazon could work with commercial and residential high rises and put a dock on their rooftops. So, the drone approaches the building rooftop, puts the package in the docking area (that keeps out poor weather), and then flies away. One of the receptionists could then get a notification of a new package, pick it up, and either put it in the appropriate mailbox, or hold it at the desk.
Want to get more advanced and efficient? When your package is delivered, Amazon sends you an access key to the dock. You can now go to the rooftop, type in your access key, and get access to the room to get your package. After it's claimed, your access key expires. This means only people with packages inside the dock have access. Yes, technically if you get a package delivered, you could access the room, and steal a package from someone else. However, there would likely be a camera in the room, and there's a record of you having access, so I can't see it being an issue. You could offset the risk even more by having 10 compartments in the docking area, so there's a 10x less chance of someone else having access to the same compartment. Right now I walk through my modern condo and see packages sitting in front of doors, in hallways without cameras, and there isn't a problem.
There might be 1,000 people living in a high rise, or thousands working in one. It would be easy to get tens of thousands of people access to air deliveries at home and work with a dozen docks. It's also a great selling point for offices and condos. "Our building allows you to receive air deliveries."
Say you could navigate the package from the warehouse to a persons property, how would you deliver the package while eliminating the risk of injury? My thought would be to have the drone phone home so that a real human could perform/oversee this last stage of delivery. In cities you could see if delivering to a rooftop is feasible to avoid having to negotiate sidewalks/people.
A lot of obstacles in the way here but I would love to see
this succeed. I envision a world where a table sized gas powered version of this could carry more packages futher.
It wouldn't have to be while the vehicle was in motion on public roads. Think mobile warehouse: Pull into a parking area, launch the drones, collect the drones, reload. I dunno how many dozens of packages you could deliver within a mile radius or so, but it would be a lot more than the driver could drop off on his own, which is the point. And maybe someday you don't even need a driver.
If this idea is going to work at all (and that's a big if) these things were always going to have to fly over roads and land in driveways.
I had the crazy thought that drones ladden with deliveries could dispatch from the top of a central tall structure (like a skyscraper or antenna), take advantage of the height differential to efficiently glide toward their delivery destination, and then make their return with less weight to carry. Probably very few locales where this could make sense compared to automated sidewalk deliveries like Starship. The speed of the delivery could be astoundingly fast though.
Well then you don't need a drone. If you get texted that the delivery person is about to arrive at your place 20 mins before they get there, you can grab the package directly from the delivery person.
Even if that was technically possible, it sounds like just putting these last few meters into the hands of the driver who's in the car anyway (yeah, I know, level 5 self-driving tech will solve that problem in 2020 as well - another one of those dream castles in the sky...) would be waaay cheaper.
And more flexible: not everyone lives in a standard American suburb home with a garden, a veranda and doorsteps in front of it. Lots of people live in multi-tenant houses without gardens, even without doorsteps - or if there are doorsteps, they end directly on the street, so anything left there is stolen within minutes. Hypothetical drones would have to ring the bell, fly through the staircase (without chopping off anyone's head in the process), find the right flat, maybe ring again, leave the package and find back to the car.
This task gets fully automated as soon as someone is able to produce an affordable and reliable human-like robot (in terms of extremities) and outfits it with an actually working AGI. Before that happens, it's cheap labor exploitation galore, and if the government should intervene in that reckless exploitation, maybe coupled with people shifting some of their deliveries away from their doorsteps and to delivery to pick-up stations (because of incentives like that being the only free delivery option, or being the fastest one).
Here's a thought: vehicles that are already scheduled (uber or robot-taxies) are already scheduled from point A to point B. Drone scheduling could piggyback on this such that as large vehicle passes restaurant R at A', a drone from R lands and disgorges your sandwich into a locker mounted on a landing pad on top of the taxi. (hand waves - that's just a mechanical problem, can't be worse than what a fast food place is doing.) As the ground vehicle approaches B, a new drone (or the same drone, if it was just hitching) could finish the delivery to your home H at B'.
Obviously it would take a lot longer than a direct flight, but the energy consumed would be far less.
I don't see what problem delivering packages with drones would be solving, package delivery seems already quite efficient to me. Also I suppose drones would often be able to deliver just one package at a time because of weight restrictions.
I pick up most of my packages at the local post office because I live in an apartment, it's a 5 minute walk away, not really an inconvenience.
Responses that I have not yet seen in the comments.
1: These could deliver into my apartment on the nth floor by coming through an open window, as well as the mentioned balconies and front yards or the roof.
2: We could not just set our delivery point up using a app on our smartphones (GPS wtc), but those phones could also broadcast over the various radios to the device and even use the camera to help the UAV navigate. Enter a few hints about route and off we go.
3: The UAVs can be launched from delivery vans to save on the flight time from the larger depot. Drive to a delivery area, deliver the big parcels by hand while the little parcels are automatically delivered by UAVs operating from the roof of the van.
4: The cost of UAVs will come down - significantly - so they may become semi-disposable for the delivery company. In 2015 that may not be true, but by 2025 I can certainly see it.
5: The UAV's could, if they are set up with the right taxi-like business model, be used by a variety of delivery actors, including individuals as well as businesses. So after the Amazon delivery I use the drone to take a parcel to the post office for delivery to an eBay buyer.
I don't doubt that a delivery company would want to do things as cheaply as possible, but I also don't oppose regulations to prevent them from skimping on certain safety features. We do, for example, require Amazon delivery vehicles to follow all vehicle safety regulations (or, if there are cases where they're not enforced, they obviously ought to be).
It might be reasonable to worry that delivery drones will suddenly take over cities before regulations can even be put in place (although that apparently hasn't happened yet). But it's not reasonable to assume that there's something unique about drones that will make them inherently more impervious to reasonable regulations and thus inherently much more dangerous than, say, existing delivery automobiles and airplanes. In fact, I would expect any remotely competent deployment of delivery drones would be much safer than the delivery automobiles they replace, simply due to the baseline accident rate of automobiles.
I would like to see a startup for what amounts to background checked, bonded, doorman service. Someone in my neighborhood I could trust to take deliveries, stuff like that. Outsourcing trust, I guess.
I could see drone delivery company "tipping" some old retired guy to solve their "last tenth of a mile" problem as he walks down the block to my house.
Alternately make all uber (or insert other) driver watch some training videos and tell them to be at xyz address at abc time and they verify safety and walk the last 50 feet and hand deliver, for a modest tip of course.
Presumably if I watched the training videos and didn't have badminton nets and kids pool and ham radio antennae in my backyard the drone could deliver directly to me and save me the cost.
You could have drone ports installed in convenient locations like Amazon locker. In fact, just build out Amazon lockers supplied by drones all over your city. They could handle like 90% of traffic? The large packages would still be delivered by humans. Or maybe ... have them dropped off at the drone port, and then have a wheeled bot make the last mile delivery, since they are quieter.
I've imagined a sub-car-sized delivery drone. Think one or two-wheeled drone that arrived outside with your bread and milk. Impacts traffic less, you don't need to be driven, makes smaller purchases more economical.
You could have a postbox-like port that it could put items into.
It will combine perfectly with drones. One of the things I think is going to be really hard for drone delivery is the last ten feet - once there's a drone outside my locked apartment building, what's it going to do? Knock and hope the manager is there to let it in? Leave my package on the city street? (fuck no). But combine it with this, delivery at a reasonable hour when I can be home to receive it, and it's perfect.
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