Amazon Is Closer to Drone Shipping Than We Think
By: Matt Stevenson
Tags: Technology, Amazon, Drones, Future, Tech

The Journey to 30-Minute Shipping

Amazon went from selling books in 1995 to selling almost everything. Jeff Bezos believes its success can be boiled down to an extreme focus on the customer.

A big part of focusing on customer experience is in the area of delivery. Packages often arrive well before they are supposed to, even if you don’t pay for Amazon Prime. But if you do pay for the service, deliveries are getting even faster. In some major cities like Nashville, groceries can be delivered within 2 hours and some packages are able to be delivered the same day or next. But what Amazon plans to do next is truly inspiring.

Drone Ships

Recently a Japanese filmmaker posted a video of a massive Amazon drone ship deploying several smaller delivery drones. The video wasn’t real and he posted it as a joke, but Amazon did actually file a patent for a floating warehouse. Imagine a fulfillment center stocked with products in the air flying to places where demand is high like major sporting events and festivals. Whenever one of these fulfillment centers needs to re-stocked, a smaller drone ship will meet it in the sky bringing more staff, drones, fuel, and inventory.

Companies file for patents all the time, but it almost never translates into an actual real-world product. What this does show is Amazon’s ambitions for its drones. For the company, this isn’t a joke or a marketing stunt, but a very real possibility.

Drone Delivery Success

The plans to deliver packages within 30-minutes by drone started out in the UK. Two hours north of London, in the Cambridge area, Richard Barnes became the first person to ever receive an Amazon package by drone as a part of Amazon’s test trial.

After putting in his purchase, a fulfillment center received it, then packaged up the items. The maximum weight their drones can carry is 5 lb, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but Amazon is quick to point out that 75% to 90% of its orders are under that limit. After Barnes’ order is packaged, the box is loaded onto a drone and taken via a track to the outside where the ship raises to nearly 400 ft. The drone then guides itself via GPS to his house and uses sense and avoid technology to detect the surroundings.

Since that trial in 2016, the drone’s design has changed, favoring a shape that better uses all of its propellers for movement. Tests are still being carried out in the UK and around the world. Better yet, the drones could be coming to America.

Drone Shipping in The US

Earlier this year, Amazon received federal approval to operate as a drone company in the United States. The drone company joined two others, Wing Aviation, owned by a Google parent company, and UPS Flight Forward.

Getting the OK from the FAA was not easy. Amazon had to prove its operations were safe. The drones are packed with three types of sensors: visual, thermal, and sonar. The sensors can detect when a person gets too close or within the landing zone and can even spot things as thin as a clothesline. Still, when we’re talking about an unmanned aerial vehicle, it’s not without risks.

In case of a catastrophic failure, another Amazon patent shows a drone breaking a part deliberately in the air, before a controlled collision into a tree. Yes, Amazon plans — at least on paper — to explode malfunctioning drones in the air and crash them into trees. The reasoning is if it’s going to crash, it’s better for it to crash in small pieces rather than one large chunk of metal. Another option is to rely on parachutes for the landing. The California startup Zipline uses this method to deliver life-saving blood supplies to rural areas in Rwanda.

Drone Infastructure

While Amazon continues to develop its technology to be safer, they have to figure out the logistics of making drone deliveries within a tight 30-minute window. Fulfillment centers are usually located on the outskirts of cities to accommodate their large size, but this is inconvenient for deliveries into large cities where a growing number of people live.

One solution is to construct different kinds of fulfillment centers that can be tucked into a downtown area. Amazon holds patents for several cylindrical and coned shaped buildings. These buildings would be almost like beehives with drones coming and going. These buildings could also act like a command center, similar to a flight tower at an airport.

Amazon’s drones can travel up to 15 miles before running out of power. Instead of heading back to the fulfillment center to replenish the battery, Amazon could charge their drones on a structure similar to a lamppost, where a drone can land and recharge. These lamp-like structures could also double as a pick-up and drop-off point for packages.

Amazon thinks this kind of set-up could extend to any tall structure like parking garages, church steeples, and cell towers. There are many options to consider. A combination of any or all of them could very well be used, although many regulatory hurdles exist.

If and when delivery drones take to the sky 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 that the company’s guiding philosophy is a focus on the customer, but there is another philosophy. At Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle, Bezos named one of the buildings “Day One,” which reminds everyone to treat every day as the first day of a startup in order to work quickly and focus on results. If it’s day one at Amazon, then they’re just getting started.