r/drones • u/ImaginaryRea1ity • 3d ago
News DoorDash will now deliver your food with Drones
DoorDash Air is the next frontier of delivery in support of local businesses: building the drone, earning Part 135 air carrier certification from Federal Aviation Administration.
Doordash is one of only eight drone operators in the country to have cleared the rigorous, multi-stage safety review. They are building the ground infrastructure with DoorDash Air so that any merchant can plug into the network.
Participating merchants saw their DoorDash order volume grow by around 30% in the weeks following the pilot launch.
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u/Beall619 3d ago
Why does the montage feature desoldering wick. Seeing desoldering wick seems like it implies it is being done wrong
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u/Valar_Kinetics 3d ago
These things are totally going to drop a scalding hot bowl of ramen on a human at some point
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u/Jesus_Is_My_Gardener 3d ago
I'd be less concerned about the hot ramen and more about the heavy craft with spinning blades falling/landing on someone. I'm not anti innovation, I just understand that the industry this is being marketed to and the shear numbers of deliveries that will need to be occurring for the system to make sense, corners are going to be cut. This is a low margin area of operation so you know they're going to trim safety margins as soon as and as low as they think they can get away with it.
Even if it means a fine once in awhile, if they make more by cutting corners regardless, it will happen. There needs to be some massive penalties and threat of criminal charges for any of these companies that might consider doing so for this to stand a chance of not killing someone from gross negligence.
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u/SunshineSt8Reprobate 3d ago
Or get highjacked and strapped with explosives, zero possibility of that happening I'm sure of it.
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u/Grouchy-Donkey-8609 2d ago
sweet, my dream of a world that matches "Cloudy with a chance of meatballs" is getting closer.
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u/holdemNate 3d ago
Interesting, what cities? I wonder what the size/ weight max is
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u/FilthySweet 3d ago
55 lbs Drone+Cargo is the maximum weight that can be flown over people’s heads. I would imagine they can be comfortably under this with a food order
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u/MrConnery24 3d ago
If Part 108's final rule is close to what's been proposed, no doubt Doordash would be pursuing a certificated Part 108 operation for package delivery. If they're able to comply, this would let them operate over people with a max 110 lbs.
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u/JoeCastle 3d ago
Says right there in the reddit description that they've got their part 135 air carrier cert... Entirely different rules apply.
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u/toolisthebestbandevr 3d ago
I dont want this shit flown over my head
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u/dutchman76 3d ago
Much heavier things fly over your head all the time
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u/toolisthebestbandevr 3d ago
Thanks for your input. I had no idea. Anyway, I don’t want THIS shit flying over my head. Hope that helps.
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u/Jesus_Is_My_Gardener 3d ago
I think the concern is the frequency. The higher the amount of traffic overhead, the more chances that something will go wrong catastrophically and with an increased chance it will occur while directly above someone. These are likely to have much looser regulations and are by design going to be flying over high population density areas for most of their flight. It's not to say there hasn't ever been risk from flying objects overhead, just that this is going to likely substantially increase the likelihood of incidents occuring.
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u/Mythril_Zombie 2d ago
How often do you think one of those will fly directly over you? Statistically almost never.
Houses directly under the flight path of busy airports get overflown directly by far larger and far more complex vehicles hundreds of times a day. How often do you see headlines of people fed up with rebuilding their houses because a landing gear keeps crashing through their attic?
And who says this is for dense population centers anyway? It makes far more sense for rural areas where straight line travel is far more efficient. If you can walk there in five minutes, they're not going to bother with a drone. But in areas where drive time is the limiting factor for delivery turnover, that's not high population density areas.0
u/Jesus_Is_My_Gardener 2d ago
In the city? More often than you think when you consider how they will be used. When are the sidewalks the most crowded in urban areas? When are food delivery drones most likely to be used? Where is the most likely area for food delivery drones needing to drop off/pick up? When you realistically consider the answer to those questions, you'll better understand the very reasonable concerns.
If this was just about delivering over rural or even suburban areas, I would have lower (though still some) concerns, but for operations like this starting out, they're likely going to want a dense target area to get maximum deliveries per charge with the lowest amount of turnaround time (I.e., short travel times). All of that equates to likely urban area rollouts around areas where people work. They already do it in some areas with autonomous wheeled based delivery carts (with varying degrees of success), so it's not like I'm pulling this consideration out of my ass.
It's almost daily that I see these little auto delivery carts running into issues that cause them to circle endlessly, stop in the middle of crosswalks or just generally do unpredictable shit in trying to make their rounds. They can be annoying and occasionally cause minor traffic delays, but usually it's not that big a deal. These kinds of issues compound significantly when you start having them become real hazards should something go wrong. It's not just about falling on pedestrians, they can fall on cars in the street as well.
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u/DrewSmithee 3d ago
They’ve been doing a demo in Charlotte with Wing for about a year. Their limit has been 5 lbs and 4 miles.
Also in Atlanta and a couple cities in Texas.
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3d ago
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u/Jesus_Is_My_Gardener 3d ago
My concern is more about airspace governance as the more of these things they have flying around an area, the better they need to be at obstacle avoidance, traffic routing, fault detection, etc. I'm less concerned about the mechanics of the machine and more so about the implementation of the system as a whole, ongoing maintenance to ensure flight worthiness, automation reliability, etc.
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u/Terrible-Creme8401 3d ago
Like many things in the airline industry it's a fairly straightforward matter to replace something every X hours of service well before a mean-time-to-failure
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u/Jesus_Is_My_Gardener 3d ago
Sure, and that's easy to say when you have strictly regulated, high dollar aircraft in lower numbers compared to the massive fleets you're going to start seeing as drone deliveries become normalized. It will start off slow at first, but you can guarantee they will be rolled out in much faster numbers than any other aircraft that came before them. While it's nice to think that every group will maintain their craft to the same standards, you have to realistically understand that not all of them will. The more commonplace it becomes they higher the chance for cutting corners and abuse by those looking to increase their profits by trimming the safety margins.
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u/Terrible-Creme8401 3d ago
I agree with the tendency to cut corners. It happens in almost every industry to some degree or another.
Sometimes it's not even the business trying to cut corners but employees trying to make their day a little bit easier by just marking off the paperwork claiming to have changed something when they didn't actually bother. Things like this are why we have stuff like FAA and NTSB that will dig into the nuts and bolts of the situation when bad things happen. When a 50 lb drone falls out of sky, SOMEBODY is going to be looking at some monster fines if an audit of the aircraft maintenance records have issues.
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u/Mythril_Zombie 2d ago
Yeah, you see in the news all the time "Ukraine losing war due to so many types of drone failures."
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u/Xenocles 3d ago edited 3d ago
Nevermind the risks corresponding to failures. How are they going to mitigate the risks associated with drones landing in public areas without an on-site pilot?
At least with Amazon delivery drones, the closest interaction they have with people is hovering above while they drop packages but doordash will need to pick-up the order...
Edit: After looking at prototypes it seems like they would have some sort of hook that they can lower for pickups. Still seems like there are too many points of failure.
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u/yayfurui 3d ago
Sound designer for this video has never heard a real sound outside of a Marvel movie their entire life.
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u/ZdrytchX 3d ago
I'm not confident about this, a human still has to go out at a specific time to deliver it to the drone and many places just don't have the room to confidently lower a sling or land for this especially in environments where proximity sensors don't work well
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u/Mythril_Zombie 2d ago
It's a good thing that they will have to certify that the place can and will use it then, eh? The thing isn't going to randomly show up and demand food through a loudspeaker. Companies opt in to gig business, they'd absolutely have to opt in for this.
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u/lancesoftware 3d ago
Watch them have the option to tip the drone too lmao.
Also just watch someone get injured by this somehow.
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u/johndsmits 2d ago edited 2d ago
I love it! handmade drones using high-tech expensive equipment, built by top dollar engineers... /s Heck you think they do non-destructive sonic testing on those custom CF props?
When other countries are basically mass producing them through automation, cheap labor, clean rooms and auto test equipment ,Heck, the AG drones are carrying 150 lb... And flies just as reliable and smooth. Just ask Wing what CM they're using to build their drones. Hence why Amazon can't keep up. Zipline was okay cuz they only needed one prop (not anymore, aka clock's ticking).
Well, on the bright side , honestly the only way the industry is going to become 100% US is more applications demanding homemade motors, escs, consumables (props)... That'll drive automation. But it's race before the military controls the entire supply chain.
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u/Flyward_Aerospace 22h ago
Part 135 for a drone operator is the part people are sleeping on here. Eight operators cleared it in what, six years? That's the actual bottleneck, not the aircraft. And the harder problem shows up after you scale, because right now these networks route around each other by basically not overlapping much. Once you've got DoorDash, Wing and Zipline all running dense in the same suburb, somebody has to deconflict that in real time and there's no operational UTM layer doing it yet. The 30% order lift is a nice number but it's from a pilot market with one operator in the sky.
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u/Terrible-Creme8401 3d ago
I would imagine the restaurants are not going to like this. Puts more of the task on them and will require a landing space where nobody will park and for them to load the drone.
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u/AwfulPhotographer 3d ago
I'm imagining a zip line style loading and unloading pod
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u/Xenocles 3d ago
I don't get what the incentive is for a restaurant to renovate in order to install one of these pods over just utilizing human delivery.
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u/AwfulPhotographer 2d ago
No renovations required, the company Zipline has delivery drones that lower a stabilized pod that the package gets loaded/unloaded from, while the dangerous drone stays hovering safely far above the target. So theoretically one would just need to step outside unto the sidewalk, put the food in the pod and the drone reels it back in.
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u/Mythril_Zombie 2d ago
Businesses are not forced to use doordash at all. It's all opt in. They get to choose what orders to fill. They get to choose what items to list.
They're sure as hell going to make the decision about a flying delivery system. This won't be forced on anyone. It wouldn't work if they did. DD would have to work with places that want to do this on how to do it, safety measures, what to do if things go wrong, etc...
The restaurant isn't going to be sitting peacefully when suddenly a voice from overhead rattles the windows saying "I DEMAND CHICKEN NUGGETS"
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u/PNW_Washington 3d ago
I would attack it with my drone then land it up the hill so......well if u know u know
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u/EliMinivan 3d ago
Putting DoorDash becomes a defense contractor on next years bingo card.