Amazon’s Delivery Drone

Amazon still delivers most of the stuff I order from them via truck and human.

But TechCrunch is reporting the company has a new delivery drone, and is indicating it will start making deliveries via drone in the coming months.

The drone is “chock-full of sensors and a suite of compute modules that run a variety of machine learning models to keep the drone safe.”

The drone safe? What about we customers??

I can’t wait for the first redneck video of some doofus shooting the Prime Air drone out of the sky with a .12 gauge.

FYI, the new drone can fly up to 15 miles and carry packages that weigh up to five pounds.

More deets:

There are four traditional airplane control surfaces and six rotors. That’s it. The autopilot, which evaluates all of the sensor data and which Amazon also developed in-house, gives the drone six degrees of freedom to maneuver to its destination. The angled box at the center of the drone, which houses most of the drone’s smarts and the package it delivers, doesn’t pivot. It sits rigidly within the aircraft.

It’s unclear how loud the drone will be. Kimchi would only say that it’s well within established safety standards and that the profile of the noise also matters. He likened it to the difference between hearing a dentist’s drill and classical music. Either way, though, the drone is likely loud enough that it’s hard to miss when it approaches your backyard.

Domino’s Pizza, your move!

30 Feet Off the Right Wing

The drone-initiated flight halt called yesterday afternoon at Newark Liberty International Airport was all but inevitable.  

Meaning, I just assumed after the Gatwick drone incident late last year in the U.K. it was only a matter of time before The Beatles came to America.

This was the sit rep according to a report from The New York Times: The drone was spotted about 3,500 feet over Teterboro Airport in New Jersey (a smaller airport 17 miles north that handles private planes).

Hobby drones are, by law in the U.S., not supposed to fly over 400 feet and “operating restrictions include no flights near airports, no flights near or over people, no flights in controlled airspace” without a permit, according to FAA 14 CFR 107.

In this particular case, one airline pilot reported the drone was about “30 feet off the right wing.”  Too close for drone comfort.

Flight operations were impacted at Newark for about 90 minutes before flights resumed.  

Better than Gatwick’s three days, but alarming nonetheless. 

No Laughing Matter

Did you hear the one about the personal voice assistant that, for seemingly no apparent reason whatsoever, started breaking into strange laughing noises at random?

No?

Well, I heard about it firsthand, but apparently I missed the opportunity to hear random guffawing of my own personal Amazon Tap.

According to Bloomberg, Amazon confirmed yesterday that in rare circumstances, the voice assistant can mistakenly hear the phrase “Alexa, laugh,” which under its normal programming would cause it to chuckle. 

Amazon has updated a fix for the problem, and is changing the trigger phrase for laughing to “Alexa, can you laugh?” instead.

A few moments ago, I tried the new command, and all I got from Alexa was a “Tee hee.”  

How very anti-climactic.

This quirk has been referred to in AI circles as a “false positive.”

Let’s just hope the voice commands for the AI algos running the armed drones have their laughs in order.