It's going to be a great time when the crows, raccoons, and other semi-intelligent wildlife discover that these drones have food in them at seemingly random reward schedules.
Sure, you can give the drones little tasers to keep the animals away, depending on your locality. But knowing what I know about bears and crows, almost nothing is going to stop them. Especially when some influencer jerk tries tempting a bunch of them with a box just oozing honey or some other high value food.
Except for those 4-8 prop blades spinning at high rpm. Then multiple layers of packaging to get the item. It'll be interesting to see if it actually happens, my prediction is that trash bags will still be preferable risk/reward.
According to the company's own video, there's a lot of attack surface outside of the blades.
And birds incidents with actual planes show that it's not the same reasoning as human warfare : inflicting damage to the enemy while taking none.
For delivery companies it won't matter if the birds got out safely or died in the process of destroying their $$$$ drones.
I would argue it would be worse for the company if the birds died because once that gets all over the Internet I have a feeling that demand for any service that kills birds would drop significantly.
It just made me realize how the animal-and-kid genre of movies completely disappeared after the 90s... I guess animated films are much more profitable and less complicated to create.
A friend of mine suggested that being able to stop eagles attacking his drones used for land surveying would be worth a lot of money, they often come back with scratches and damage. I'm not sure if he's lost any drones (yet).
I can definitely see a future time when small autonomous air vehicles start to have problems with the local wildlife, either from the thick flocks of grackles in winter or from the more mischievous neighborhood corvids.
The advantage of the trebuchet or other indirect fires is that the package need not contain and carry a large energy source. For so long as it has enough kinetic energy to maintain maneuverability, soft landing in a yard or porch could be done maybe.
It's going to be a great time when the crows, raccoons, and other semi-intelligent wildlife discover that these drones have food in them at seemingly random reward schedules.
Sure, you can give the drones little tasers to keep the animals away, depending on your locality. But knowing what I know about bears and crows, almost nothing is going to stop them. Especially when some influencer jerk tries tempting a bunch of them with a box just oozing honey or some other high value food.