By Jack Nicas
A Google drone lowered a box of dog treats and chocolate bars to
a rancher in the Australian outback in August 2014, the payoff from
two years' work to show that a drone could make deliveries.
Google then scrapped the drone and started over.
One problem was how the wind often toppled the device on takeoff
or landing. "It was a dumb thing about physics," says Chris
Anderson, chief executive of 3D Robotics Inc., which has made parts
and software in Google's drones.
Google parent Alphabet Inc. and others in Silicon Valley are
broadening their sights from the digital to the physical world in a
bid to expand their influence, and their bottom lines. They promise
to reinvent everything from cars to thermostats to contact lenses.
Yet in a sign of how innovation is stalling broadly in the American
economy, they are finding their new terrain far harder to control
than their familiar digital turf.
Alphabet's 58 self-driving cars have traveled 2.2 million miles,
but they are still flummoxed by snow and drive so conservatively
they can disrupt traffic. Its high-altitude balloons designed to
beam internet to remote areas have sometimes crashed in shreds,
baffling engineers. A planned interactive jacket was delayed for a
year in part because its sensor-embedded threads snapped under the
pull of industrial looms. The tech giant abandoned projects
involving cargo blimps, vertical farming and seawater-to-fuel
technology that proved too difficult or expensive.
Others face similar problems. Facebook Inc. is struggling to
launch solar-powered drones to beam internet connections via
lasers. Starship Technologies, led by a co-founder of video-chat
service Skype, plans a fleet of delivery robots, but current models
use human operators to cross a road.
In software, programmers can control their environment. The
physical world is messy and unpredictable. Even the smartest
computers can't prepare for every possibility. Add to that the
burden of public safety and regulation and it is easy to see why
the tech industry hasn't been able to replicate its success in the
digital realm.
"The world is so unforgiving. You can't just ask it to be more
organized, " said Astro Teller, the ponytailed chief of X,
Alphabet's research lab that has investigated -- and decided
against -- space elevators and jetpacks.
Moreover, digital progress is rapid, because computing power
increases dramatically over time and software can be replicated
endlessly. In the physical world, advances are constrained by
physics.
Silicon Valley's push into the physical world "is going to be a
much longer, slower process, especially in the next couple of
chapters," said Andrew McAfee, a Massachusetts Institute of
Technology professor who studies technology's impact on
society.
That timeline isn't typical for Google. Larry Page and Sergey
Brin launched the search engine -- then called BackRub -- in 1996
on a single computer in a Stanford University dorm room. By 2000,
the service handled 60 million queries a day.
That year, Google director and early investor John Doerr said,
"The new economy is based on bits, not atoms," a reference to the
ones and zeros of computer code.
These days, Alphabet is very busy with atoms -- in cars, robots,
drones, smoke detectors and wind turbines, to name a few. Current
and former employees, say Messrs. Page and Brin tell workers to
focus on "atoms, not just bits." Mr. Doerr said in an interview
that he believes the founders are still more focused on bits.
With that mind-set, Google in 2010 formed X, its factory for
"moonshots, " or projects that tackle a big problem that could take
as long as a decade. Its roster includes Project Wing, the team of
roughly 85 workers designing drones to ferry packages. The Wall
Street Journal compiled an account of the team's efforts via
interviews with current and former employees.
To Alphabet executives, drone deliveries are the next stage of
logistics -- the 21st-century equivalent of the Pony Express.
Google formed its delivery-drone team in 2012 and hired
Massachusetts Institute of Technology robotics professor Nick Roy
to run it. He brought along two graduate students who had built a
winged drone that could fly autonomously through an MIT parking
garage.
Unbeknown to Google, Amazon.com Inc. was already developing its
own delivery drones, which it disclosed in 2013.
At first, X considered using drones to ferry defibrillators to
heart-attack victims, but abandoned the notion after realizing that
approach is no better than an ambulance. Says one former employee,
"When it doesn't work, is [the news headline] going to be: Google
Drone Kills Elderly Man By Being Late?"
Project Wing shifted to drones to deliver small parcels -- from
food to electronics to medicine -- and bolster Google's role in
logistics, where it was starting a shopping-delivery service.
The few civilian drones available in 2012 were so-called
quadcopters, which take off vertically and hover. But copters are
inefficient; their batteries typically can power only 20 minutes of
flight, less when carrying a package. The alternative was a winged
drone, which can fly farther but can't hover. It also needs a
runway to take off and land.
Mr. Roy said he wanted a drone that could do both -- take off
like a copter and glide like a plane. They settled on a so-called
tailsitter -- a glider that sits upright and uses propellers to
take off vertically, then rotates in air to glide horizontally.
Engineers cycled through a series of prototypes -- code-named
the Auk, the Bauk and the Super Bauk -- before settling on a
white-foam-and-plastic glider dubbed the Chickadee that was roughly
3 1/2 feet long and weighed 18 pounds.
Each version brought problems. Flights that worked in software
simulations didn't work in the real world. The drone didn't follow
flight paths precisely. The device toppled when trying to land on
its tail. Antennae became disoriented when the craft rotated in
midair.
Mr. Anderson, who has provided parts for Google drones, said the
drone suffered from "the spork problem, where you try to get
something to do two things and it does neither very well."
Testing software is straightforward. Changes can be simulated at
the push of a button, and flaws can be spotted and fixed. Google is
famous for testing software extensively. It constantly tweaks its
search algorithms to make sure they are delivering the most
relevant results for users.
Hardware is more complex. Engineers had to design prototypes,
build them, fly them, crash them, rebuild and test again. Refining
one small part, a wing flap called the elevon, consumed weeks, Mr.
Roy said.
Beyond designing an aircraft, the Google team faced an equally
vexing challenge: how to deliver a package.
Engineers shadowed deliverymen from Google Express, the delivery
service. They saw the wide range of delivery locations, from homes
with back entrances to apartment complexes with courtyards.
Shippers often struggle with the "last-mile problem;" one former X
employee called it "the last-inch problem."
They struggled to devise a solution. "Do you land? Do you lower
it on a string? If you land, are people going to steal the drone?
Are they going to be afraid of it? How dangerous is it going to
be?" the former employee said. "There was endless debate -- I mean
months -- on landing versus not landing."
The team eventually settled on lowering the package on a winch.
But that required the tailsitter to hover upright, creating a sort
of sail in the wind.
Similar questions bedeviled the drop-off location. Satellite
data isn't precise enough to ensure the drone is over the right
house, particularly in cities. Even when the address is correct,
camera sensors need to interpret the scene below, so the package
doesn't land on a roof or in a pool.
For deliveries, both Alphabet and Amazon now are considering
asking customers for help. In a scenario depicted in an Amazon
video and that former X employees said Alphabet also is
considering, customers would place a specially marked mat as a
landing pad that a drone could recognize from above.
One former X employee compared the notion to "having to go out
and meet the mailman when he gets there."
By early 2014, Google co-founder Mr. Brin, tiring of the delays,
set a deadline: Make a delivery to a non-Googler in five months.
That led to the dog-treat drop in Australia.
After that, "we threw everything out," one former employee said.
"Everything. I mean not just the form factor...[Everything] was
deemed bullshit."
Mr. Roy returned to MIT. Mr. Teller replaced him with Dave Vos,
a South African aerospace engineer.
The bald, cerebral Mr. Vos brought a rigor unfamiliar on the
famously loose Google campus, aiming to replicate the strict rules
of the aviation industry. He ordered frequent tests of drone
designs, including in a wind tunnel. In early 2016, Mr. Brin moved
his desk into the Project Wing offices to help push the team
along.
Wing's new drone resembles a catamaran, with a 5-foot wing laid
across two thin poles that each support two rotors and a fin. Like
the tailsitter, the device takes off vertically and glides
horizontally, but doesn't require midair rotation. X has registered
75 drones dubbed "hummingbird" with the FAA under the alias
Ashfloyd LLC, according to registration numbers shown in an X
video. Amazon is testing a similar design.
Like the tailsitter, the new drone is unreliable, former
employees said. Over months of tests earlier this year at Flying M
Ranch, a 20-square-mile cattle ranch in Merced, Calif., X's drones
repeatedly crashed, wandered off, lost power or tried to land in
trees. One former employee said the goal was to complete 1,000
flights without an incident but they could never pass 300.
X aims to create an online exchange dubbed Wing Marketplace
where customers can get orders from retailers and restaurants
delivered within minutes via drone, former employees said. X would
charge customers a $6 drone-delivery fee. X has met with Whole
Foods Market Inc., Domino's Pizza Inc. and a series of other
restaurant and fast-food chains, former employees said. X's control
over the user experience killed talks with Starbucks Co. to deliver
coffee, the employees said. Whole Foods, Domino's and Starbucks
declined to comment.
In September, Project Wing completed its second deliveries to
non-Alphabet employees. Its drones ferried burritos over a closed
field from a Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. food truck to some
Virginia Tech staff and students a few hundred feet away.
A few weeks later, Mr. Vos and his top commercial executive
resigned. Alphabet executives pushed out the pair over conflict
with the team's top engineers, according to people familiar with
the situation. Talks for a test in Ireland are now on hold.
Mr. Teller says obstacles and setbacks are the nature of X's
work to innovate in the physical world. "The moonshot factory is a
messy place. But rather than avoid the mess, pretend it's not
there, we've tried to make that our strength. We spend most of our
time breaking things," he said in a TED Talk earlier this year.
A spokeswoman says X remains "wholeheartedly committed" to
delivery drones and isn't downsizing Project Wing. "We believe that
opening the skies to faster, more efficient transportation of goods
is a moonshot worth pursuing," she says. X aims to carry out more
tests next year.
Amazon, meanwhile, is testing its delivery drones in the U.S.
and Cambridge, U.K., while a startup named Flirtey Inc. last month
started delivering Domino's pizza via drone in a small test in New
Zealand.
One major challenge to tech's push into the physical world is
its high stakes. For the first time, tech firms are crafting
devices that could hurt people. Last year, the propeller of a
hobbyist's runaway drone sliced a U.K. toddler's eyeball. The
potential dangers mean that regulations could hamstring tech
companies accustomed to launching products on their own
schedules.
But former employees say regulations aren't the main problem.
One former X worker says Alphabet is "a software company -- not an
airplane company."
--
Alistair Barr
contributed to this article.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 06, 2016 11:56 ET (16:56 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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