[riotnrrd]

I used to work in perception for autonomous aerial vehicles and horizontal wires were the hardest common object to avoid. Traditional stereo won't help you localize them -- wires are thin so even mere detection can be hard, and one portion of a wire looks much like another so feature matching fails resulting in bad or no depth estimates -- and LIDAR sacrifices resolution for weight and power consumption (which both have to be optimizied for drones). It's been years since I've worked in this field, and Amazon has many smart people thinking about it but I'm not surprised it's still a difficult problem.

[cesarb]

> Traditional stereo won't help you localize them [...] and LIDAR sacrifices resolution for weight and power consumption

I wonder if a more mechanical solution wouldn't help:

Whiskers, like on a cat. A long enough set of thin lightweight whiskers could touch the wire before the propellers do, giving time for the drone to stop and change course. Essentially, giving the drone a sense of touch.

[jrussino]

As an undergrad I worked with a professor who was doing precisely that! https://sense-lab.github.io/pubs/pdf/solomon_nature_2006.pdf

I hadn't thought about this in a long time. Looks like her lab is still going strong doing research at the intersection of biology and robotics on whisker-based sensing:

https://sense-lab.github.io/robotics.html

https://sense-lab.github.io/publications.html

[ianferrel]

Thin lightweight whiskers are going to be challenging to manage on a propeller-driven vehicle. They'll get blown all over the place. Having them extend out past the propellers will likely get them tangled in the propellers.

[drjasonharrison]

A cage around the drone, there are kids toys like this, and also commercial products for inspection. Prevents contact with other objects, contact can be sensed and reacted to. https://www.flyability.com/elios-3

Doesn't protect against everything, like Spanish Moss which dangles from trees, but that is a lot bigger than a long thin wire.

[cromka]

Would help avoid damage with other misrecognized or ignired objects, too.

[vpShane]

Ah yeah I came up with the solution to that one. It's 'don't fly drones over our heads' approach. Also the 'upgrade the fragile infrastructure so a light breeze doesn't take out millions of people's power.'

[venturecruelty]

Sorry, not profitable enough, not a "team player". Please enjoy these weekly 1:1s with your manager and HR.

[wat10000]

It’s really hard for people too. The advice I got for landing in a field was to assume that every pole you saw had wires going to every other pole. Which is reasonable enough for that scenario, but not workable for continual low altitude flying in a built up area.

[parliament32]

> horizontal wires were the hardest common object to avoid... Traditional stereo won't help you localize them

This makes a lot of sense. I wonder if it wouldn't be better for autonomous vision to use three cameras instead of two for better spatial reasoning.. maybe in a triangle pattern?

[riotnrrd]

We experimented with a rig with more cameras on it (four, in a square) but the baseline of the cameras on the drones we were using could be measured in centimeters, so the vertical stereo pairs didn't provide much better results. Further, more cameras means more power, more weight, and much more expensive on-board processing (which also will require more power).

[bri3d]

Definitely tough. mmWave radar is useful for this use case; I know Amazon were testing it on earlier drones but I'm not sure if they still use it.

[londons_explore]

Cables don't move often. Why not simply have a map of all of them?

Google sell maps of things like this from street view data.

[octoberfranklin]

Any one particular cable might not move often, but if a telco owns N bucket trucks it's a safe bet that about N cables move every workday.

Telcos are notoriously secretive about the location of their fiber. They even got most state legislatures to exempt it from state-level FOIA laws.

[HenrikB]

OpenStreetMap supports annotating poles and theirs cables. It's common for power lines (local and long distance). There are also annotations for communication lines (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:communication%3Dline).

There are also public and proprietary "aviation obstacle" databases across the world.

[riotnrrd]

All cables? Everywhere in the entire country? Accurate to the centimeter level and updated on the hour?

Edit: This was flippant, but the real issues are: any map you get will be incomplete and obsolete almost immediately and cables move and sway in the breeze.

[thinkcontext]

> Traditional stereo won't help you localize them

Wouldn't making a quick circuit around the house before landing allow wires to be observed from multiple angles be enough?

[drjasonharrison]

Yes but tradeoffs with delivery speed, and thin wires are still hard to detect with limits on vision processing.

[rkagerer]

Helicopter pilots have trouble with them as well.

[PunchyHamster]

It's very simple: don't fly there

there are very little aerial lines few meters highers and ones that exist can be probably spotted from satellite images and planned around.

Especially if delivery area is limited, they could just map them out of the routes.