The Amazon Prime Air service or what is the same the use of drones for parcel delivery, is already operating in two small towns in California and Texas. It won’t work for every shipment or everywhere Amazon operates, but it is the culmination of an ambitious project that seemed like science fiction a decade ago.
We still remember when in 2013 Jeff Bezos presented the Amazon Prime Air project and jokes from users and competing companies flooded the Internet. Among the best, that of Groupon stood out, which proposed an alternative delivery system by catapult as “a parcel delivery system that had been around since the time of King Arthur”.
Jokes aside, once they received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to fly their drones, the project has come true. Service has started in sparsely populated, rural areas near the cities of Sacramento and Houston. “Our goal is to safely get our drones into the skies. We are starting in these communities and will gradually expand deliveries to more customers over time.”explain the spokespersons for this Amazon Prime Air.
Its operation is known. Residents of both cities can sign up for the service and Amazon will confirm that the company can safely deliver to the customer’s address. Once an order is placed, the customer gets an estimated delivery time and tracking information. «The drone will fly to the designated delivery location, descend into the customer’s backyard, and hover at a safe height.”they say. It will then safely release the package, climb back to its height and return to the warehouse automatically using its GPS and camera system.
Amazon is using a MK27-2 hexagonal drone with six propellers, designed to minimize high-frequency sound waves, although it is already testing other more advanced and lightweight ones such as the MK30, which will be able to fly in adverse weather conditions, such as rain. . At the moment, the company focuses on achieve safe transit above all else. While drones fly autonomously, using GPS and algorithms to avoid obstacles like power lines and chimneys, delivery control is still done by humans.
In the future, these small UAVs will be able to function fully autonomously, delivering packages up to 2.7kg (most Amazon deliveries), at distances of up to 10 miles and in an estimated time between 30 and 60 minutes.
The future of Amazon Prime Air
If all this drone delivery with parcels still seems like science fiction to you, pay attention to what Amazon is preparing for the future with the “orders from heaven”.
An Amazon patent application spoke of aerial warehouses or “airborne fulfillment centers” for drone use. A kind of blimps equipped with a certain amount of inventory and positioned near a place where Amazon anticipated there would be demand for certain items. High-flying logistics…
