[cmiles8]

This is the latest in a string of accidents with these drones crashing into things. Not good.

The earlier ones hit a crane which one could argue was an edge case as a temporary structure. This just hit a building which suggests something much more fundamentally wrong with the tech.

[ecosystem]

I wonder what the acceptable collisions/delivery needs to be for it to match last mile truck safety level (ie UPS trucks are big and run into things with non-zero frequency)

[idle_zealot]

I'm sure there's a surprisingly high frequency of "acceptable" collisions if the bar is matching truck-inflicted property damage and injuries. Much like with replacing human drivers with computers, though, merely matching the cost and harms of the existing system is far from enough. Entrenched systems benefit from familiarity with the associated costs and risks, and from any structures built to mitigate them. New solutions have to be much better to gain acceptance.

Fortunately, automated systems can meet that higher threshold so long as we actually aim for it. If you aim for the lower "beats existing systems by some measures" bar then you make stupid decisions and tradeoffs like rushing to market or leaving out more capable sensors. We ought to try to make new technologies as good as possible. Sometimes the market will bet against that, but that's a tide that engineers should fight back against. Trucks kill too many people, and if drones kill half as many that's still unacceptable. We can do better.

[delecti]

People are more accepting when there's a person who can be punished. There's also the fact that society generally expects cars/trucks hitting things. A drone impact might be a more minor impact, but it's possible for it to hit things that are more shocking to the public if they get hit.

[nomel]

> This just hit a building

Please be specific on what you mean by "just"? From the article:

> Amazon told CBS Texas that it’s investigating the cause of the crash that happened Wednesday afternoon.

Did it hit a bird? Did the wind blow something into it? Was it a 0.01% occurrence of some hardware failure? Who knows. Design flaw?

Extrapolating a few crashes within this new tech use case to a some fundamental flaw of drone flight isn't reasonable, at the moment.

I suppose a safe alternative would be pneumatic tubes dug to everyone's door. But, only things that are economically feasible can exist in the world. So, instead of perfection, we're left with the iteration and compromise that is engineering, regulations and enforcement to bound it, and insurance to catch the edge cases.

A large part of the FAA regulation around drones is one based on existing in reality, and it's lack of perfection, which is how much damage they can do (this is what limits the weight and speed).

[freejazz]

>The earlier ones hit a crane which one could argue was an edge case as a temporary structure.

I would expect them not to fly into any kind of structure. That they'd hit a crane is pretty insane considering what the results of something like that could be.

[hermannj314]

Zero? I think the expected number of collisions can be larger than zero. Jimmy Johns sandwich delivery by bicycle has resulted in more collisions than zero and that is arguably safe.

You are setting an impossible standard.

[sejje]

I would expect the result to be the same as running into anything else: drone and any payload crash into the ground.

Drones are lightweight, they're not going to do much to heavy machinery. Basically the same as a brick wall.

The real fear is propellers hitting a human. The result is not good at all.

[walt_grata]

Vibe steering and navigating