Early Retirement Extreme Forums

I was in meeting with a developer of commercial warehouses and he stated that he is building drone pads on top of his buildings. These are in the Northeast US.

I started doing some "research" on the topic and found this article that contains videos of test runs in Australia for food and medicine.

https://gizmodo.com/alphabets-wing-land ... 1833907433

This one showed the relevancy of drones for blood transfusions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnoUBfLxZz0

I see this as similar to the evolution of the internet, first as government/military/public service centric until "they" figure out to find it's ultimate commercial ends. You know Jeff Bezos is calculating the savings at this very moment and I don't understand why everyone is worrying about space travel when they should be worried about more practical things, like tracking the flight of their Dominos pizza.

It appears AeroVironment and Kratos are the top military manufacturers. NVIDIA seems to be the most likely play in chip manufacturing. Obviously Amazon/Alphabet. Anyone else thinking about how to monetize this?

I'm thinking about buying a drone and gluing a trowel onto it and using it to clean out gutters.

That's actually a great idea. Please video so I can watch the initial tests where it decapitates a bird and cuts your cable line.

I'd love to be able to kill birds with it, but I think I'll need to attach a laser or dart gun or something. Probably laser.

Existing big-box stores: WMT, TGT, LOW, HD, KR etc. The stores and products are already there. Draw a five-mile or whatever circle around each store and you get far better coverage of the country than, say, AMZN and wholefoods.

If delivery companies/supermarkets/similar start seriously using drones to deliver, I must admit I'm a little concerned about the handling of any products involved - would the drones be programmed to wait around for the customer, or would they just drop the package on your doorstep? Would they be able to tell you from your next-door neighbour? If the package is fragile, will the rate of damage be lower or higher than for human delivery workers? Drones have a lot of potential, though, for sure.

Packages are left by delivery services at our doorstep all the time. And as far handling, google "UPS Worker throwing boxes over fence at Christmas time" to give you idea how that method isn't always handled correctly.

Viewing the videos, certain packages are dropped or attached from a string as it hovers. The one problem I see with that is unattended children attaching their little siblings and well, you could have flying baby issues, which would be kind of fun, assuming its not your baby flying through the air. In others, like for drops in territories with minimal infrastructure or disaster relief, they have parachutes.

Also, you could make bandit-bots to steal whatever the delivery-drones are carrying.

I imagine they will need to make drunk droning laws as well.

Actually, there might be some legal loophole that would allow one to steal drones. This might be my new career. I should buy a horse and a .22.

D. = drones

Look at Africa for companies to using that as a testing ground. Less roads, less air space regulation, and a desire to succeed (vs hold on what we got America). I haven't looked too deeply but it seems to me that none are VTOL aircraft. D. heliocopters don't have the range and D. planes still need a strip. Route Ds. have no need for speed, yet I see no bi-Ds. I see it used for agriculture, DNR and border patrol also.

I will look into this more. Less estorotic than bio-engineering.

The video I linked about re: blood transfusions is in Rwanda. They are as proficient in the use of drones as an country in the world for the reasons you mentioned.

I would imagine there will need to be FAA regulation and oversight. I have no idea how that will work. For instance, will individuals be able to send their own drones or will we be limited to third-party, commercial providers. Will houses soon be built with launch pads like they are with electrical charges for Teslas.

The Rwandan blood delivery network is a fascinating technological achievement, I was amazed by the precision demonstrated in the mid air drone collection. That hook was tiny.

Drone delivery suffers similar range, load capacity and energy delivery/density limitations as e-bikes, and electric cars/trucks, so I don't see them taking off outside of these small package niches. There's a reason over 95% of transport runs on liquid fuel. There looked to be a lot of human labour involved in the preparation and handling of drones too, I'm not sure how scalable it would be for an amazon warehouse based on the Rwanda model of winged drones.

As advanced as it is now, the advent of 5G technology where there will supposedly be the removal of a latency period, the capabilities and accuracy will only increase and therefore greater use.

https://www.qualcomm.com/news/onq/2016/ ... skys-limit

lol@drone racing

https://thefranklinsociety.com/amp/14-r ... t-to-soar/

Tickers:

NOC
AMBA
IXYS
STM
GPRO
INVN

Keep in mind that the ones in the defense sector will be tied to the political cycle and defense spending and will bahave differently to ones that sell to the private sector which would be tied to the business cycle.

Thank you. That's great.

I own a couple of quads. They really burn through their big lithium poly batteries fast. And they’re awfully light. I cannot see carrying much more than a pack of cigarettes on board for a decent flight. They if you want to increase battery capacity to handle payload you get this diminishing return problem like electric freight trucks have. As weight increases you need more battery that leads to more weight which needs more battery and so on.

The most useful thing I’ve done with my drone is retrieve a bundle of birthday balloons for my wife. They had floated up to the apex of our vaulted ceiling about 20’ up. I flew up there, tangled the strings in my props and the copter stalled and dragged the balloons down. Yay drone.

I think I’d like to use mine to drop my neighbor’s dog bombs back on his property. He just walks his dog over to my lawn, lets it poop and walks away. I thing a milk carton can be rigged to dump on a banked turn as I pass over his place.

Edit - I am hopeful for the more airplane like drones used by Amazon and Google that use vertical takeoff. People have already figured out the energy issue with helicopter like aircraft.

I noticed a couple of developments in my area:

Organized Drone Racing:

https://brooklyneagle.com/articles/2019 ... ard-party/

And real estate developers lobbying for their use:

https://therealdeal.com/2019/07/16/deve ... es-in-nyc/

Appears there is a 70+ year old law on the books banning their use in NYC.

On an international level, it appears Australia and New Zealand are at the forefront.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/16/2069 ... ontrol-app

Israel is also doing a lot with them, such as inspecting oil spills in hard to reach locations. Based on the documentary, Start UP Nation, I bought a small stake in an ETF holding Israeli companies. There really isn't anything to do over there except come up with new shit.

From an investing angle, I found an ETF specific to the drone industry - IFLY

https://www.etf.com/IFLY#overview

Dominos pizza in New Zealand tested a drone in 2016 to deliver pizza to a customer that lived 20 miles away from the Dominos pizza store. The drone took just 5 minutes to deliver the pizza.

Drone going 240mph? Nah....