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.
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:
But that's fine, isn't it? If they're intended to detect fixed objects, then noticing that one or more of them have ceased to be blown around in that way may be a good way to detect unanticipated contact with a fixed object: When the signal becomes less noisy, then maybe something is in the way.
And the whiskers don't have to be all floppy like a wet noodle. I myself am thinking that something rigid or semi-rigid might be good. Perhaps something akin to armature wire, or thin spring steel. Maybe even literal bamboo chopsticks.
They can also be constrained so that they don't get sent into the props.
My little brain thinks that the drone-end of the whiskers can be attached to potentiometers, with light return springs to bring them back towards center, like the mechanism used by an analog stick on a PS3 controller.
I don't think you're right about this. The concept of the whiskers is to notice when you've collided with something. Real whiskers aren't rigid because colliding with something when you're rigid means snapping. (Ever stub your toe?)
Think of the rigidity of the whiskers as being traded off against your maximum movement speed.
(The whisker can be both rigid and also flexibly-attached. These are not mutually-exclusive constructs.)
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.
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?
Wouldn't making a quick circuit around the house before landing allow wires to be observed from multiple angles be enough?
Google sell maps of things like this from street view data.
Telcos are notoriously secretive about the location of their fiber. They even got most state legislatures to exempt it from state-level FOIA laws.
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.
As is apparently becoming obvious.
> I can’t think of a major city I’ve been to on earth
There are also public and proprietary "aviation obstacle" databases across the world.
The double crane cable incident ( https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/02/us/arizona-amazon-drones-cras... ) and the LIDAR failsafe issue ( https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-16/amazon-re... ) were both rather surprising from a process and management standpoint. This issue seems more like a run of the mill "problem with drone delivery conceptually" that Amazon will have to deal with.
the point is not news, its to keep you on their sites as long as possible with no escape
Given that prior incident and now this the FAA will likely not be too kind to Amazon. The permission on drone tech is predicated on very strong “see and avoid” technology. Given two pretty bad screw-ups now in as many months the FAA won’t be amused at the failures in the tech on these drones.
This sort of thing is a largely solved problem for bigger aircraft and a similar approach with quite a lot of international regulation and agreement seems to be needed.
Drones could be given a cross section of airspace to work within that is say a horizontal slice about 50m to 100m above ground level, with various rules on resolution (ie what constitutes ground level at any point on the planet). The minimum height should clear most obstacles that are hard to spot. There would be flight corridors defined between take off and landing zones. There would be exclusion zones around areas such as air fields and military locations etc.
Drones could even be allowed to use commercial airspace provided they follow the existing rules and are detectable and contactable etc.
The tricky bit is working out take off and landing zones and rules for them. At the moment, aircraft try to avoid flying over habitation zones. I live near to a helicopter factory and used to work there so I have some idea of the issues involved.
There are lots more rules that could be added for safety. For example, requiring height when flying in a non corridor depend on direction. However, I'm only allowing a 50m zone here but then a drone is only about 1m "tall". Even something as simple as divide the compass up into say 16 zones for wind Beaufort 0-2, eight zones for 3-4, four zones for 5-6 and ban flight at 7+. Those wind designations might depend on gust speeds or constant and could be transmitted. The idea is that things get a bit random as the wind speed increases. Divide the allowable height by the number of zones and set your height accordingly. So flying directly north will be at say 50m and directly south at 100m. The wind speed should also indicate the density of drones allowed per horizontal area. That will need some experimentation and legislation to determine what is "acceptable".
One cable getting damaged is inconvenient, but I'd have to laugh it off if it were my service. 5G would be a good enough backup in the meantime, and how often are you going to get to see these types of accidents (hopefully almost never) so it'd be cool to have a story.
"I ordered some flaming hot cheetos from a drone, and it broke my internet cable!"
Go slowly in the opposite direction of said contact first, then if that is not working try to rotate on one of the horizontal axis while going in the opposite direction to see if it make a difference, and if it doesn't then something is stuck on your skin, and you should be able to notice that your weight is not the same as before; if that's not the case, then maybe your sensor is just broken, but then maybe you could be able to notice some difference in the power consumption of the tactile components array, and if that's not the case ... well, maybe that sensor is off too ? Wait ... what are you doing in Madrid ?
The solution is probably a dial before you dig style registry that corresponds to an altitude floor, but I honestly doubt the ability of rural telco to meet that requirement.
Shouldn't it be thick, armoured cable, attached to a strong wire or something?
Edit: The MK30 is 78 pounds, and about 6 feet diameter. Here is an image with a human for scale:
https://dronexl.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Amazon-Prime-A...
Maybe it's an RG6 drop, but it could also be ethernet or a fiber drop. They're all thin wires, though.
Otherwise, they’re probably not very loud or frequent, don’t really present much of a privacy issue vs. what street view already has, and they maybe make the roads a bit safer. Might take some jobs away from delivery van drivers. Nothing seems worth getting overly concerned for.
That's a LOT of drone traffic, given there's near zero ability to double up on a single stop as there is today.
Now if we could just get our landscape crew (HOA, not mine personally) to adopt electric leaf blowers. I hate this time of year and the constant roar of those things.
I just have a hard time seeing this becoming a major quality of life issue in the real world. It’s gonna be fine.
And birds and bees seem to be fine around waterfalls and airports, I think they’ll survive drone noise.
1. Properly ticket and reprimand the people breaking traffic laws.
2. Properly reprimand the companies who contract out and run the vans.
3. Build cities that don't necessitate driving everywhere for everything.
4. Buy things in stores.
There. Now you have a whole bunch of free drone parts.
For the same payload delivered, ground vehicles cause significantly more property damage, environmental damage, and injuries/deaths.
Heh, you've not heard my neighbors riced out car then.
But the biggest harm is people getting hit by vehicles. Delivery drones are much smaller and don't spend nearly as much time near people. Since drones can deliver stuff more quickly than large vans, they also substitute for individuals driving to a store to pick something up. So the total risk to pedestrians is even less than you might expect from eliminating many van deliveries.
I live in a noisy neighborhood with commercial truck thru traffic.
I don't have any particular love for the noise or the trucks, but the kind of people who complain about noise and machines will mostly don't select to live here which is good because I find those people to be bad generally.
But I really, really don't want drones flying over my house, polluting the already noisy soundscape, etc. This just strikes me as a terrible idea.
But in my heart of hearts I am certain the convenience of drone delivery -- and an absence of sufficient regulation -- would lead to a drastic net increase in noise instead.
If they must exist, I hope they're priced/taxed such that they're used sparingly.
It'll be awesome when they decide that the parking spot in front of my house -- with no trees or overhead lines -- is an ideal place for drone staging.
(And no, I'm not particularly worried about any of these noise issues. I predict that it'll all sort itself out just fine. Besides, I personally think the spectacle of a swarm of package delivery drones leaping forth from a truck is something that I would never tire of observing.
But it is fun to think about the problems and the solutions. The deeper one dives, the more complex they get.)
If Amazon can accidentally take down internet in a large area with a cheap commercial drone... what can a genuine bad actor do with a few thousand of these. If this is any indicator, half the country is going to be blind and deaf in the first day of a Taiwan war, it's going to be be over before we even get back online.
What a joke!
If Mikey's RC car hits someone's foot in the park, will the DOT investigate?
I was at the principal engineers offsite summit in scenic Cle Ellum when they supposedly announced prime Air.
I know, I know, what the f** ever, but there was something very ominous and significant at this unveiling. If this were my demo and my unveiling, I would have had a drone pick up a package at one side of the auditorium and drop it off at the other side of the auditorium.
What we got was a mock package and a mock drone and lots of talky talk from a guy who didn't last long at Amazon. This set the tone for everything going forward. And the engineers of tech, the real engineers of tech, not the toxic empathy talkers who can't do anything (tm), need to put these people in their place or the enshittification will continue unopposed.
I'm mostly out of f**s here having made what I needed to make but it's fun to post here in a position of not caring what people think of me anymore. Make of that what you will.
Edit: Come on PE snowflakes! You want to talk about that thread on the principal engineering list about how long it had been since any of you had actually written a line of code? I do. It explains a lot about you guys.
And don't get me started about that urgent missive about only hiring fungible people. Because fungible equals generalist and that's why both you and Google have the horrible retention rates you have. I can tell I'm not the only one that was in the room for that ridiculous presentation from the downvotes. Keep going and no worries, Amazon will have more than enough money to acquihire the people that actually solve these problems.
what if the next time it hits a clothes line and lands on someone?
the FAA investigates anything that might cause shit to fall out of the sky
