top | item 45453231

(no title)

djtriptych | 5 months ago

Two drones doesn't really mean anything if they were following a similar flight plan to make a delivery at the same location right?

discuss

order

BobaFloutist|5 months ago

It means it wasn't a fluke or a bug specific to one drone, but something wrong in the overall software approach.

oofbey|5 months ago

The repetition strongly indicates it’s a bug. No reason to think it points to a fundamental flaw in the approach.

djtriptych|5 months ago

i mean they both flew into invisible drone traps.

I don't know that amazon engineers should be expected to see e.g. a moving small steel cable under tension.

That and customers are required to select safe delivery drop zones.

I would like to see better "oh shit we're crashing let's try not to kill anyone" protection, e.g. research on improving controlled landings on damaged drones. Maybe refusal to deliver if there are any detected humans in the drop zone (which may well already exist).

JCM9|5 months ago

It means Amazon’s approach to its “see and avoid” responsibility is fundamentally flawed in some way vs this being a one-off fluke with a broken sensor or other anomaly.

djtriptych|5 months ago

ok but also two drones crashing isn't "more" of a problem than one drone crashing really.

Sounds like the anamoly here was a very unsafe landing zone (which is outside the customer agreement as it happens).

small steel cables take out human pilots too..

Would be really curious how they might guard against adversarial drone deliveries. Kinda weird to have end users basically piloting your $100K (I'm guessing) vehicles.

krferriter|5 months ago

At the same time? If there's a crash there should be an automatic system which geofences off that area making it impossible for other drones to go near there, while the situation is assessed.

Atheros|5 months ago

If a drone crashes, obviously no other drones should fly there until a human determines what went wrong and presses the 'resume' button. The fact that that system did not exist is a systemic problem.

djtriptych|5 months ago

That sounds like an engineer-week of work not really a ground-up systemic problem. But fair criticism.