Drone deliveries hey?
What
could be more convenient than having the milk for your cereal arrive fresh each
morning, or that forgotten dinner ingredient plonked down on the doorstep just
as you fire up the stove?
Well, details now revealed in an Amazon patent
application suggest that if its Prime Air drones do materialize, they mightn't
just be limited to making house calls. The application outlines plans for
drones that track a customer's GPS position, flagging the possibility of having
items brought to you even when you're out and about.
Stuck in a traffic jam and in need of a snack?
Out boating on
the lake and out of refreshments? Amazon's "Bring it to Me" delivery
option may one day come to rescue. This feature was one of a number of finer
details revealed in the patent filed last September and now made public by the
US Patent & Trademark Office.
"With the implementations described herein, a user now has
the ability to choose "Bring It To Me," the patent states. "With
this option, the actual location of the user is determined and the UAV delivers
the item to the current location of the user... For example, the user may
identify their current location by allowing Global Positioning System
("GPS") data to be provided by their mobile device."
In addition, the application describes a communications network
between the drones in Amazon's fleet, intended to relay data between the
vehicles to assist with route planning. This information might pertain to
weather, air traffic and landing conditions and could be shared dynamically
with nearby drones and a central location.
It is also possible that more than one drone will take part in
the delivery of a single item. A package may be picked up from the warehouse
and dropped off at a relay location by one drone, and then retrieved and the
delivery completed by another.
Amazon announced
its Prime Air delivery service in
2013, drawing mixed responses from the public, with many less than convinced of
the service's real-world feasibility. Delivering packages by tracking
customer's smartphones may only do more to engender this widely held
skepticism, but all signs coming out of Amazon in the last year suggest it is
pretty serious about one day rolling out the service.
Since the initial announcement, Amazon has grappled with the
Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in an effort to fast track its testing.
Slow progress has moved the company to test the drones just north of the Canadian border, while
continuing to lobby the
authorities to accommodate its
needs inside the US
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