Bitcoin Forum

This needs to happen.

http://www.myfoxdc.com/story/22560500/sushi-restaurant-using-unmanned-flying-drones-to-deliver-food-to-customers#axzz2VvJhjKWB

Someone needs to set up an app that can send bitcoins and GPS information to a restaurant and have a drone with food come and find you.

:D

That sounds like a big handful of lawsuits waiting to happen...  :-X

The drones are so close to being able to "be their own entity."  :o

not feasible.

Civilian GPS accuracy sucks, (intentional to prevent US enemies from using GPS guided munitions) so your drone has to use LIDAR or similar navigation methods. Also, in the news story, the drone is only used inside the restaurant, essentially replacing a waiter.

There was an article a while back where a business wanted to deliver tacos using drones. I believe the problem was with FAA regulations. Something to do with commercial use of drones being prohibited.

completely feasible (technologically).

Technologically, it is fairly easy to set up an autonomous drone and has been for a couple of decades. Think of a Neato or Roomba vacuum cleaner as a starting point. Think of a good AI in a modern game - the pseudo-code is "just" a PAGE table (percepts, actions, goals and environment descriptors). Real-world complications include politics, flight issues, hardware costs and um, that's about it (assuming ethics of such matters died with Asimov). Politics is the big one, as voters might get upset if a few drone oopsies happened to their loved ones. If you don't insist that your drone fly - if you're content with one that rolls, walks, hops or crawls then politics is about the only pragmatic deterrent, and even that boils down to error tolerance in the "goals" part of the PAGE table. Is it OK if your drone spends its life sidling up to anything warm to say "hello" or do you want it to decide to do something more specific? Is it OK if it jay-walks? Do you mind if it inadvertently pushes somebody's baby stroller out into a busy street as it delivers food?... Mere implementation detail (as we used to say about anything challenging).

As for the GPS issue, one obvious implementation is to use GPS up to about 10-20 meters then switch to something like IR, much the way a contemporary car offers GPS for "the trip" but IR for the parking sensors.

Easy stuff, technologically. Too expensive and error-prone for restaurants at the moment, and too politically hot for governments, so far.

If you like the idea of sandboxing this kind of thing, try MIT's (free) StarLogo.

The problem was not the FAA, during their trial run of delivering tacos they used Predator drones and shot the tacos at people...this did not work well.

Not feasible? Are you kidding? This is beyond feasible.

We already have something very similar to this:

-Send USD to a certain defense contractor
-A drone delivers a bomb to a specified customer using GPS tracking etc

It can't be too hard to adapt this to bitcoin and food delivery...

 ???

That makes it even more impressive.

Yep. They are for killing only.

 :D

Bitcoinexchangedrone.com -> Give cash to the drone, he flies to the btc seller, seller transfers the btc and drone give him the cash  ;D

interesting read, thanks op :)

this is where bitcoin creates inovation

Unless the drones just airdrop the food, this could easily be a huge money sink. Too easy to just jam the transmission and then get the drone; a drone is worth way more than most foods you would be delivering, even if just for selling the parts.

You forgot the drone is fully load with bombs and machine guns. You should better not touch it  8)

It is possible. I don't know about civilian GPS in the U.S., but where I live I work on a daily basis with a sub-decimeter precision GPS only system. And I am a civilian, not from LE or something. You also have GLONASS, the russian "gps". But you pay 15000€ at least for an entry level GPS like this. I work in topography, and the margin of error can't be more than 2 centimeters.