On Sunday, Amazon.com introduced Amazon Prime Air..!
In an interview with CBS's "60 Minutes" on Sunday evening, Amazon.com founder Jeffrey Bezos said with the Amazon Prime Air service, a service that delivers packages via autonomous drones. He hopes that the company will be able to deliver packages into customers hands within 30 minutes of the time they place an order.
The package is pulled off the lines by the octocopter, and then using GPS it is directed to the delivery address. When it arrives it releases the package on the doorstep. Because the octocopter has eight blades, Bezos said, if one broke the drone would still be able to safely drop off a package. As many have remarked, it looks like something out of the Jetsons.
He said Prime Air would be available for packages weighing 5 pounds or less.
Amazon says that its quadcopters and Prime Air service will be ready in time for FAA approval of civil unmanned aircraft (i.e. quadcopters, drones, etc.) in US airspace. If all goes to plan, the FAA hopes to have suitable regulation in place for civil unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) by 2015.
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The current FAA UAS roadmap says very little about autonomous vehicles, though, and we’d be surprised if the 2015 regulations allow for Bezos’ vision of a fleet of autonomous quadcopters. (As far as the technology goes, though, autonomous quadcopters with built-in collision avoidance algorithms should be fairly common by 2015.)
Still, as a concept, Amazon Prime Air is very exciting.
In the 80-second clip, which you can watch below, a shopper buys an item on Amazon. The item is then placed into a plastic yellow Amazon container and picked up at the end of a conveyor belt by an Amazon drone, which takes off and soars over a grassy field before depositing the package with a thud outside the shopper's doorstep.
