Drone Delivery By Amazon
Amazon is named after the largest river in the world — you can see it in the business’ early logo. The river may flow through the tropical forests of South America but it seems the company has an even bigger reach. Amazon went from selling books in 1995 to selling everything. Jeff Bezos believes its success can be boiled down to a philosophy he described in an interview with CNBC during the early days.
If there’s one thingAamazon.com is about it’s an obsessive attention to the customer experience end to end. A big part of focusing on customer experience is in the area of delivery. Packages often arrive well before they’re supposed to even if you don’t have Prime. And if you do, deliveries are getting faster: going from two days to one, to same-day shipping. But that all pales in comparison to what comes next.
This giant floating airship is deploying packages carried by Amazon drones except it isn’t real. It just so happens that a few years ago, Amazon did file a patent for a floating warehouse. Imagine a fulfilment centre stocked with products in the air flying to places where demand is high like sporting events. When the airship needs to restock, a smaller one will meet it in the skies, bringing along staff, drones, fuel, and inventory.
Companies file patents all the time but it doesn’t necessarily translate into anything real. What this does show is Amazon’s ambitions for its drones and it started with deliveries here in the UK. Two hours north of London, in the Cambridge area, Richard Barnes became the first customer to receive an order by drone as part of Amazon’s test trial. After putting in his purchase, a fulfilment centre received it, then packaged up the items.
The maximum weight the drone can carry is five pounds which don’t sound like a lot, although Amazon points out 75 to 90 per cent of its orders are under that limit. The drone makes its way down an automated track before rising like a helicopter to nearly 400 feet. It’s guided by GPS to the destination and uses sense and avoid technology to detect the surroundings. Amazon promises Prime Air will make deliveries in 30 minutes or less. Since that trial in 2016, the drone’s design has changed.
The latest version has a noticeable tilt allowing the use of all six propellers to move forward. Tests are still being carried out in the UK and around the world and they could be coming to America. Earlier this year, Amazon received U.S. federal approval to operate as a drone company, joining two others: Wing Aviation, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, and UPS Flight Forward. Getting the okay from the FAA wasn’t easy.
Amazon had to prove its operations were safe. The drones are jam-packed with three types of sensors: visual, thermal, and sonar. No sensor by itself can do it all and let me give you an example: fluffy dogs are invisible to sonar. Besides looking out for cute fluffy pets, the sensors can detect when a person gets too close and very significantly can spot things as thin as clotheslines in a backyard or wires. Still, when we’re talking about an unmanned aerial vehicle, it’s not without risks.
In case of a catastrophic failure, another patent shows the drone breaking apart deliberately in midair, splitting on the ground and in a lake, before a controlled collision into a tree. The reasoning is if it’s going to crash, better it be in small chunks rather than a big one. Another option is to rely on parachutes for the landing. The California startup Zipline uses that method to deliver life-saving blood supplies to rural areas in Rwanda.
While continuing to develop the technology to make it as safe as possible, Amazon has to figure out the logistics of making drone deliveries within the tight 30-minute window. Fulfilment centres are usually located on the outskirts of cities to accommodate their large size yet this is inconvenient for deliveries into cities where a growing number of people live.
One solution is constructing a different kind of fulfilment centre that can be tucked into downtown, blending into the surroundings — such as this cylindrical building or a beehive-like structure that resembles London’s iconic Gherkin skyscraper. This can also act as a command centre similar to a flight controller at an airport managing traffic as drones come and go. These flying machines can travel up to 15 miles before running out of power.
Instead of heading back to the fulfilment centre to replenish the batteries, they can do so on a structure like a lamppost which would be reconfigured to allow for charging and also double as a pickup and drop-off point for packages. The drones would communicate with a central control system either through a wired or wireless connection, bringing free wi-fi to the area. Amazon thinks this kind of setup can extend to pretty much any tall structure such as parking decks, church steeples, and cell towers.
So there are many options to consider and a combination of any or all of them could very well be used. Although many regulatory hurdles still have to be cleared, if and when drones take off on a large scale, they will change our idea of delivery. We will no longer think in terms of days or hours but minutes. I mentioned the company’s guiding philosophy is the focus on customer experience but there is another philosophy at Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle.
Bezos named one of the buildings Day One, treating every day like the first day of a startup, to work quickly and focus on results. If it’s day one at Amazon, then they’re just getting started.
