December 3, 2013
WASHINGTON: Better known in some parts of the world for delivering death from the sky, drones could soon be delivering life-saving parcels, from medicines to mail, to your doorstep.
Amazon testing drones for same-day package delivery
December 3, 2013
WASHINGTON: Better known in some parts of the world for delivering death from the sky, drones could soon be delivering life-saving parcels, from medicines to mail, to your doorstep.
Amazon testing drones for same-day package delivery
In a thrilling leap of technology – and a major PR coup – Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos on Sunday revealed an experimental drone-based home delivery service that can deposit a package at your front door or roof-top in as little as 30 minutes from the time you place an order online.
"I know this looks like science fiction, it's not," Bezos told CBS 60 Minutes on Sunday, demonstrating a working prototype of an eight-rotor helicopter drone called an "octocopter" that can pick up packages up to 5 lbs from Amazon's fulfilment centres and fly them up to 10 miles. He said the service, dubbed Amazon Prime Air, could be ready for customer use in "four or five years".
The technology is not new. In fact, one of the pioneers of the flying mini-robot is the Indian-American roboticist Vijay Kumar at University of Pennsylvania (also alumnus of IIT Kanpur) who is known for his research in the control and coordination of multi-robot formations. But the visionary Bezos, known for his out-of-box thinking, has been the first to seize the commercial application of the technology, leaving others such as Fed-Ex, UPS, and Wal-Mart to play catch up.
Amazon's octocopters operate autonomously, and once an Amazon employee enters a delivery recipient's location, the flying robot uses Global Positioning System (GPS) to deposit the package at the designated coordinates.
"It's very green, it's better than driving trucks around," Bezos said, revealing that the company is working on building in redundancies and reliablities – such as making sure the drone does not land on someone's head or crash into electric poles.
While the cassandras were already lining up potential problems and bleak scenarios (''Nine ways it could go horribly wrong,'' read one headline), Bezos maintained the octocopters would be ''ready to enter commercial operations as soon as the necessary regulations are in place,'' noting that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was actively working on rules for unmanned aerial vehicles.
The FAA, under directions from the US Congress, plans to have new airspace rules for unmanned aircraft in place by 2015. Current rules prohibit use of drones for commercial purposes.
Even allowing for the FAA loosening rules, Amazon will still have to ramp up its fulfillment centers to make drone-delivery a workaday experience, even as the flying robots themselves will have to be booted up to fly beyond the current 10miles/30 minute range. Amazon currently has nearly 100 warehouses, each more than a million square foot in area (say the size of 20 football fields) — described by company executives as ''a physical manifestation of Earth's biggest selection.''
The company, founded in 1994, initially as an online bookstore, later expanded its agenda to ''sell all things to everyone.'' It now has 225 million customers worldwide, and on a day like Cyber Monday today, the biggest online shopping day of the year, the company processes more than 300 orders every second. Almost everything is currently delivered through regular mail delivery involving humans and trucks.
Courtesy: TNN
