I gave a guest lecture last Thursday at Carnegie Mellon University at their Adelaide campus in South Australia. (A special shout-out to the fantastic students that I met there!). The talk was on the recent growth of computer vision (CV) in the industry. At the end of the presentation I showed the students some really interesting projects that are being worked on today in the CV domain such as Amazon Go, Soccer/Football on Your Tabletop, autonomous cars (which I am yet to write about), CV in the fashion industry, and the like.
I missed one project, however, that has been making news in the past few days in Australia: delivery drones. Three days ago, Google announced that it is officially launching the first home delivery drone service in Australia in our capital city, Canberra, to deliver takeaway food, coffee, and medicines. Google Wing is the name of the project behind all this.
Big, big news, especially for computer vision.
In this post I am going to look at the story behind this. I will present:
- the benefits of delivery drones,
- the potential drawbacks of them,
- and then I’ll take a look at (as much as is possible) the technology behind Google’s drones.
The Benefits of Delivery Drones
There was an official report prepared two months ago by AlphaBeta Advisors on behalf of Google Wing for the Standing Committee on Economic Development at the Parliament of the Australian Capital Territory (Canberra). The report, entitled “Inquiry into drone delivery systems in the ACT“, analysed the benefits of delivery drones in order to sway the government to give permission for drones to be utilised in this city for the purposes described above. The report was successful since, as I’ve mentioned, the requested permission was granted a few days ago.
Let’s take a look (in summary) at the benefits discussed by the article. Note that numbers presented here are specific to Canberra.
Benefits for local businesses:
- More households can be brought into range by delivery drones. More households means more consumers.
- Reduction of delivery costs. It is estimated that delivery costs could fall by up to 80-90% in the long term.
- Lower costs will generate more sales.
- More businesses delivering means a more competitive market.
Benefits for consumers:
- Drones will be able to reach the more underserved members of the public such as the elderly, disabled, and homebound.
- Since delivery times are faster by 60-70%, it is estimated that 3 million hours will be saved per year. This includes scenarios where customer pick-up journeys are replaced by drones.
- As a result of lower delivery costs, drones could save households $5 million in fees per year.
- Product variety will be expanded for the consumer as up to 4 times more merchants could be brought into range for them.
Benefits for society:
- 35 million km per year will be removed as a result of more delivery vehicles being taken off the road. This will reduce traffic congestion.
- The above benefit will also result in a reduction of emissions by 8,000 tonnes, which is equivalent to the carbon storage of 250,000 trees (huge!).
- Fewer cars on the road means fewer road accidents.
Some convincing arguments here. The benefits to society are my personal favourites. I hate traffic congestion!
The Potential Drawbacks of Delivery Drones
Drawbacks are not discussed in the aforementioned report. But some have been raised by the public living in Canberra. These are definitely worth mulling over:
- Noise pollution. Ever since 2014 when Google started testing these delivery drones people have complained about how noisy they are. Some have even mentioned that wildlife seems to have disappeared from delivery areas as a result of this noise pollution. In fact, residents from this area have created an action group, called Bonython Against Drones, “to raise awareness of the negative impact of the drone delivery trial on people, pets and wildlife in Bonython [a suburb in Canberra] and to ensure governance and appropriate legislative orders are in place to protect the community“. Below is a video of a delivery in progress. Bonython Against Drones appears to have a strong case. This noise really is irritating.
- Invasion of privacy. Could flying low over people’s properties be deemed as an invasion of privacy? A fair question to ask. Also, could Google use these drones to collect private information from the households they fly over? Of course, the company says that they comply with privacy laws and regulations but, well, their track record on privacy isn’t stellar. Heck, there’s even an entire Wikipedia article on the Privacy Concerns Regarding Google.
- Bad weather conditions such as strong winds would render drones unusable. Can we rely on weather conditions so heavily?
The first point is definitely a drawback worth considering.
Google Wing Drones
Let’s take a look at the drones in operation in Canberra.
It seems as if this drone is a hybrid between a plane and a helicopter. The drone has wings with 2 large propellers but also 9 smaller hover propellers. Google says that the hover propellers are designed specifically to reduce noise. From the video above, though, a little bit more is probably needed to curtail that obnoxious buzzing sound.
There’s not much information out there on the technical side of things. For example, no white papers have been released by Google as of yet. But I dug around a bit and managed to come up with some interesting things. I stumbled upon this job description for the position of Perception Software Engineer at Google Wing HQ in California. What a find 🙂
(If you’re reading this post some time after April 2019, chances are the job description has been taken down… sorry about that)
The job description gives us hints as to what is going on in the background of this project. For example, we know that Google has developed “an unmanned traffic management platform–a kind of air traffic control for unmanned aircraft–to safely route drones through the sky”. Very cool.
More importantly for us, we also know that computer vision plays a prominent role in the guidance of these drones:
“Our perception solutions run on real-time embedded systems, and familiarity with computer vision, optical sensors, flight control, and simulation is a plus.”
And the job requirements specifically request 2 years of experience working with camera sensors for computer vision applications.
One interesting task that these drones perform is visual odometry, which is the process of determining the position and orientation of a device/vehicle by analysing camera images. As I’ve documented earlier, visual odometry was a CV technique used on Mars by the MER rovers from way back in the early 2000s.
It’s interesting to note that the CV techniques listed by the job description are performed on embedded systems and are coded in C++. A lot of people (including me) are predicting that embedded systems (e.g. IoTs, edge computing) are the next big thing for CV, so it’s worth taking note of this. Oh, and notice also that C++ is being used here. This language is not dead yet, despite it not being taught at universities any more. C++ is just damn fast – something that is a must in embedded CV solutions.
Summary
This post looked at some background information pertaining to the Google Wing project that, as of a few days ago, officially launched the first home delivery drone service in Australia’s capital city, Canberra. The first section of the post discussed the benefits and drawbacks of delivery drones. The last part of the post presented the Google Wing project from the technical side. Not much technical information is available on this project but a job description for the position of Perception Software Engineer gives us a sneak peek at the inner workings of Google Wing, especially from the perspective of computer vision.
It will be interesting to see whether delivery drones will be deemed a success by Google and also, most importantly, by the public of Canberra.
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