Hace unas semanas, celebramos nuestro segundo hackathon formal, en el que los ingenieros de DoorDash abordaron proyectos como una herramienta para mejorar la comunicación del servicio de atención al cliente, un motor de recomendación ligero y un juego de nombres para empleados.
Ah, y también estrellamos algunos drones.
As a technology company focused on delivery, we’ve always been fascinated with different ways to get goods from point A to point B, whether it be by foot, bike, car… or quadcopter. So we used the hackathon as a chance to roll up our sleeves and figure out whether drone delivery was actually feasible.
https://youtu.be/RbzBa5Dv_zoPara el hackathon probamos dos drones diferentes: un X8+ de3D Robotics y un prototipo de dron de una empresa de reparto. Tuvimos que modificar el cuerpo del X8+ añadiendo una carga útil de reparto a la parte inferior del helicóptero y conectando una GoPro para capturar el vuelo. Por su parte, el dron prototipo se construyó pensando en las entregas, por lo que ya contaba con un estupendo mecanismo de enganche automático que permitía recoger y soltar la carga de forma muy sencilla.
On the day of the hackathon, a team of 8 or so software engineers started by assembling the quadcopter — where we quickly learned that the orientation of the blades has a material impact on whether the drone flies or not (tl;dr: don’t install them upside down). Once we finally got the drones assembled, we traveled to the baylands in Mountain View to conduct a few test flights. We used several open source projects to get these test flights working. We used the Arducopter Mission Planner to upload a few simple waypoint flight plans and tracked the progress of our drone in real time.The Arducopter software allows you to download mission log files and analyze them, which gave us a good sense of the large number of external variables that can influence the simplest of flight plans. We also performed a test takeoff and landing in our office parking lot to simulate the real restaurant pickup/delivery experience.
After a day of flights — and a few crash landings — we came away with a much better understanding of the opportunities for drone deliveries. While it’s clear that we’re still a long way off from actually delivering food with drones, we were impressed with how much we could learn in such a short time span.
One of the most exciting parts about working at DoorDash is the chance to explore, experiment, test, and play with ideas that don’t necessarily relate to our day to day responsibilities. While DoorDash won’t become DroneDash any time soon, it’s clear that drones could eventually help us and other delivery companies provide a faster and more reliable customer experience, and simplify a lot of the very tricky aspects of our logistics platform, like estimating when a Dasher will be available or how long it will take to perform a delivery.
For now though, the DoorDash Engineering team just enjoyed the opportunity to get out of the office and kick the tires — err, blades — of a new technology. If you love experimenting with new toys, and want to join us as we build the future of delivery, drop us a note here.