Drone delivery: Amazon has patented a tower for delivery drones. Amazone drones, overview, performance characteristics, application Drone delivery has huge potential on a global scale

The world's largest Internet giant Amazon has launched the "Amazone Prime Air" program, the essence of which is the development and implementation of unmanned vehicles for the delivery of goods from the Internet giant's warehouses directly to the doorstep of the end consumer. At the moment, technologies and schemes for the delivery of orders by air are being tested in the United States, in the near future the company plans to introduce innovations in its European markets.

Amazon quadcopters are capable of carrying up to 5-6 kg.

The average delivery time from the nearest warehouse to the customer is 30 minutes or less. The devices are equipped with flight safety systems, sensors for detecting and fixing obstacles, computer vision for recognizing the contours and sizes of objects, obstacles, obstacles. The first full-fledged drone center began operating at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky geolocations in Hebron, Kentucky near Cincinnati, Ohio. The development of the device began back in 2012-2013, in 2015 the FAA (US Federal Aviation Administration) allowed the devices to fly at an altitude of no more than 122 meters, no faster than 161 km / h.

AMAZON drones are already transporting more than 20 types of goods.

Among them are sports shoes, sports nutrition, clothing, microelectronics, headphones, charging stations, mobile tablets and phones, women's cosmetic bags, accessories and much more. And, of course, books.

Drone delivery has huge potential on a global scale.

The main problems that the leading scientific and technical bureaus of the world are working on are the carrying capacity of commercial drones, the work of manipulators for picking up and dropping cargo, the range and flight time of the vehicles. At the moment, our drone center presents devices for aerial and photography, as well as UAVs for agriculture. We hope to start supplying drones for delivering goods from online stores in the near future. Do you have any questions? Need advice? Would you like to purchase a device or start cooperating with us? Leave a request or call us right now.

Amazon tries to minimize the delivery time of the package using a variety of methods. These are high-speed cars, and agreements with transport companies, and trucks with 3D printers on board, which go out on local orders, creating the spare parts and parts that the customer needs.

Amazon makes a big bet on drones, believing that the delivery of goods by air is the fastest and most efficient way from point A to point B. In order to be able to work with drones as couriers, the corporation is lobbying a number of laws in the United States and other countries, which allows you to use air mini-transport for delivery. In addition, new models of such devices are being developed, as well as infrastructure elements. It has now become known that the company has filed a patent application for a tower for copter couriers, from where drones will fly out with goods.


As for the very method of delivery using a drone, it is not necessarily a “courier to the door”. The place of delivery may change, for example, if the recipient of the parcel is moving. Drones will receive information about the delivery location by receiving data from the customer's smartphone. In total, four types of delivery are provided: “Bring me”, “Home”, “To work” and “My boat”.

Drones will be built in a variety of sizes, the size will depend on the planned payload. Right now, Amazon's typical "flying courier" is an eight-propeller quadcopter with a computer control system that mounts in the middle and top of the frame. The maximum flight altitude for the drones developed by the company is 120 meters. The speed of the device in the air reaches 80 kilometers per hour.

The final design of the copters is not ready yet. The company explains this as follows: “We are testing several types of aircraft and delivery mechanisms in order to determine the best method in various environments.” Also, once the design of the drones is approved and goes into production, the design of the drones can change over time.

As for the tower for drones, it will be a multi-level building, with entrances for people, entrances and exits for cars (including trucks) and multiple "trays" for the departure and return of drones. According to company representatives, the towers will be installed in the largest population centers, where delivery by any other means is difficult. Such centers can be New York, London, Tokyo and other metropolitan areas.

True, there are several difficult moments of a legal nature. The fact is that drone flights are prohibited in large cities in most countries. The fact is that the authorities are afraid of their breakdowns during the flight. After all, even a small drone can be a significant danger if it falls on the heads of people walking below from a height of 200-300 meters and above. So, before building towers, the company will have to sort out all these points.

The company's patent application states the following: "A multi-level center is designed to support the takeoff and landing of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), likely within the city, including densely populated regions."

Several levels in such a center are needed in order for several copters to work at once. It will be like a miniature airfield - some aircraft take off, some return and land on their site. The company says that patents like this are not just like sketches from the future, such documents make this future a reality.


Number of patent applications filed by the company that are related to logistics using UAVs and other autonomous systems

Amazon is testing its systems at a secret test site in Cambridge, and testing is also underway at several sites elsewhere, including Israel and Canada.

The company also uses other methods to deliver goods quickly. For example, the semi-automatic Amazon Locker service. It can be used as a delivery point. One of these is located in Granada, where I live.

— the strangest of the big companies in the tech industry.

It's not as secretive as Apple, for example, but Jeff Bezos' company, the e-commerce and cloud storage giant, is very murky. She rarely explains her short-term tactical goals or long-term strategic vision. It's always a surprise.

Trying to understand Amazon is akin to Kremlinology (Western science of the behavior of Kremlin leaders - ed.). This is especially true of the story in relation to one of the most important areas of this business: logistics, delivery of orders to customers.

Over the past few years, Amazon has signaled that it will radically change the way it delivers its goods. Among other steps, the company has built its own fleet of trucks, implemented an uber-like delivery service, built many robotic warehouses, and continued to invest in a far-reaching plan to use drones. Another burst of activity came last week with the unveiling of the company's Boeing 767, one of 40 in a planned flying fleet.

These moves have led to speculation that Amazon is trying to replace the logistics companies it has to rely on - UPS, FedEx and the United States Postal Service, with its local service. This investment in logistics also fuels the theory that Amazon has become unbeatable in American e-commerce, no doubt pushing Walmart, the world's largest retailer, to acquire Amazon's audacious rival Jet.com for $3.3 billion.

So what is Amazon's end goal with shipping? After talking to analysts, partners, competitors, and getting some inside information from the company itself, I suspect it has a two-tiered vision for the future of consumer logistics.

First, it does not try to replace other logistics companies. Instead, over the next few years, Amazon wants to expand its operations as much as possible and is spending huge amounts of money on planes, trucks, crowdsourcing, and other new delivery services to increase capacity and efficiency.

Amazon's long-term goal is even more fantastic, and if successful, transformative for the entire business. The company wants to avoid the imperfection of roads and people. She longs for complete autonomy, in the sky. Amazon's drone program, which many tech publications have already called marketing bullshit after Mr. Grimmick talked about it on 60 Minutes in 2013, is at the center of that future. Drones will be combined with robot-controlled warehouses and self-driving trucks, opening up a new autonomous future for Amazon.

There are barriers to realizing this vision. Drone delivery in the United States faces regulatory uncertainty and a myriad of technical and social challenges. However, the experts I consulted said that a future filled with autonomous drones is a stone's throw away compared to a time in which self-driving cars rule the roost.

“Flying is a much easier task than driving,” said Keller Rinaudo, co-founder of Zipline, a drone delivery startup that is set to begin rolling out a medical device delivery system in Rwanda this fall. "If we had permission from the regulators, we'd be delivering things to your house by now," he added, referring to the San Francisco Bay Area.

If Amazon's drone program succeeds (and the company says everything is going according to plan), then it will fundamentally change its cost structure. Analysts at Deutsche Bank predicted in a recent report that in ten years, drones will reduce the unit cost of each Amazon product by about one and a half times. If this happens, then the economic threat to competitors will be very serious - "retail stores will cease to exist" - German analysts suggest, and we will live in a world more like the Jetsons than our own.

Shipping has always been at the center of Amazon's strategic investment. At the very beginning of its activity, in order to reduce the cost by the amount of sales tax, the company purposefully located warehouses in states with low tax and low population, and then sent goods to populated areas within three to five days.

The introduction of Amazon's Prime subscription program, which for $99 offered customers two-day delivery for a year, changed the needs of the commercial giant. Prime made customers buy a lot more things and forced the company to work much faster in logistics.

This explains why Amazon abandoned its strategy of reducing sales tax at the beginning of the decade and began building dozens of warehouses in densely populated areas. The company has also begun developing a system called "mail injection," which uses network prediction and analysis algorithms to figure out how to deliver each package as quickly as possible to a customer's nearest post office in the United States. According to Deutsche Bank, the "mail injection" has allowed Amazon to cut the cost of the most expensive part of shipping - the "last mile" from warehouses to customers' homes. So despite increasing the speed of logistics between 2010 and 2015, the company reduced its cost from $5.25 to $4.26 per box.

But this price is still not low enough for business. Despite recent reports, Amazon is making cosmic revenues and the company is facing bandwidth bottlenecks. Two years ago, during the holidays, a surge in online orders overwhelmed UPS, causing losses and delays.

In the long term, a bigger problem looms: the United States' transportation infrastructure is aging, and, as the Department of Transportation warns, unless urgent and costly investments are made in it, roads, waterways, airports and other systems will face the threat of collapse in 40 years 21 century.

For Amazon, this future is disastrous: the company's current investments in logistics—trucks, planes, and crowdsourced vehicles—depend on traditional logistics infrastructure. All investments, except for those made in drones - which explains why they are an integral part of the vision of the future of retail for the company.

I first realized the importance of Amazon's drone program, called Amazon Prime Air, when I met Gur Kimchi, its leader, at an industry conference a few months ago. Although our conversation was conducted without a voice recorder, Mr. Kimchi answered my questions in such detail that I immediately abandoned my skepticism about this project.

When I started talking about Amazon's interest in autonomous aerial flight with other people in the drone industry, they all noticed that drones offer a way to jump off roads as they operate in a new, unobstructed layer of physical space up to 400 feet high, which is more parts of the country are not occupied. This opens up a vast lane for logistics.

Aside from posting a few videos, Amazon hasn't talked much about its drone program. However, the company is working with regulators around the world to test a system that involves drones delivering packages weighing up to 5 pounds — which account for 80 to 90 percent of all cargo.

Amazon also said it has built many drone prototypes for various delivery circumstances. The first flights are likely to be in low- and medium-density settlements, such as suburbs, where a drone can land in the backyard to drop cargo. But the company also indicated that it is working on delivery systems in cities - for example, drones could deliver goods to smart lockers placed on rooftops.

As is often the case, the logistics company DHL has already tested a similar delivery to lockers in Germany, its representative told me that the test was successful, and the Germans plan to expand the technology in case of obtaining regulatory approval. Amazon's patent applications hint at even more fantastic possibilities - drones could transport cargo between small depots placed, for example, on lampposts.

Other players are talking about even wilder ideas. Ryan Petersen, founder of logistics software company Flexport, said Amazon has filed patent applications that plan to use trucks as mobile warehouses for deliveries. These self-driving trucks, stocked with items that Amazon thinks the area might need, will move around cities. When the order arrives, the drone can take off from the truck and reach the customer's home, reducing the delivery time to literally minutes.

Such scenes are likely to await us in the distant future. But according to Amazon, the earliest drone deliveries will happen much earlier — we'll see that within five years, somewhere in our world.

Amazon Prime Air is a service that will deliver packages up to five pounds in 30 minutes or less using small drones.

How are you going to ensure safety?

Safety is our top priority. Our vehicles will be built with multiple redundancies, as well as sophisticated “sense and avoid” technology. Additionally, through our testing, we will gather data to continue improving the safety and reliability of our systems and operations.

When will I be able to choose Prime Air as a delivery option?

We will deploy when and where we have the regulatory support needed to safely realize our vision. We’re excited about this technology and one day using it to deliver packages to customers around the world in 30 minutes or less.

What will the Prime Air delivery vehicles look like?

We are testing many different vehicle designs and delivery mechanisms to discover how best to deliver packages in a variety of operating environments. The look and characteristics of the vehicles will continue to evolve over time.

Where are you building and testing?

We have Prime Air development centers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Austria, France and Israel. We are testing the vehicles in multiple international locations.

How will Amazon integrate Prime Air vehicles into the airspace?

Safety and security are top priorities as we look to incorporate small drones into the airspace. We "re working with regulators and industry to design an air traffic management system that will recognize who is flying what drone, where they are flying, and whether they are adhering to operating requirements.

What did you announce at re:MARS?

We revealed our latest Prime Air delivery drone design. Our newest design includes advances in efficiency, stability and, most importantly, in safety. We also shared more information about Amazon’s sense and avoid technology and our efforts to build an independently safe and autonomous drone that will make the safe decision, even when faced with the unexpected. To watch a flight test video and learn more about our new drone and our safety systems, visit the Day One Blog post, .

 

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