Amazon Drone Delivery: Why It's Not Crazy

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By Pete Pachal2013-12-02 23:48:03 UTC

When is a drone not a drone? When it's a robot, which technically describes Amazon's just-unveiled Prime Air delivery vehicles. Made to fly and deliver packages autonomously, the devices make decisions on their own about how to fly and where to land — no human operator required.

At least that's Amazon's vision of the service, which won't go online for at least a couple of years. Before they make any deliveries outside of test flights, Amazon must wait — along with everyone else interested in using drones for commercial purposes — for the FAA to set the rules and regulations for civilian drones. Even then, there are a host of issues that some say could delay Amazon's robotic flight of fancy for decades.

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Amazon Prime Air is by far the most ambitious commercial drone program in development, but there's no reason it couldn't work. Today. Plenty of companies have demonstrated delivering goods via drone, including Domino's Pizza and the infamous TacoCopter. Although the flights are often promotional stunts (and not serious development programs, as Bezos says Amazon's is), they work: The drone takes off with product, flies to recipient, delivers product and flies away.

"More than 10 years ago I was stuck in horrible traffic on the LIE (Long Island Expressway)," describes Nina Tushevs of recreational drone company Tushevs Aerials, "Hungry and thirsty, the thought popped into my head that I should be able to call in an order and have it delivered to me, right there on the highway, by a small flying machine that identifies me by my phone."

Getting Prime Air Off the Ground

Technologically, there's nothing standing in the way of Prime Air. Legally, there's a lot. The FAA bans the use of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) in the U.S. for commercial purposes, although that will probably change in the next few years. In November, the FAA published its roadmap for setting rules for UAS vehicles, with a Congress-imposed deadline of September 2015.

That matches up with the date Bezos gave as the earliest possible time when Prime Air might be available to Amazon customers, but he stressed that it was more likely several years away. Bezos was vague about what needed to happen between now and then to deploy the tech safely, mentioning "redundancies" and ensuring the drones don't land on peoples' heads.

The issues of navigation and safety for a flying robot are quite serious — if you've ever been in an enclosed space with even a toy drone (such as the Parrot AR model), it can be pretty nerve-racking. Amazon's flybot will need to respond to the environment and system faults in ways that ensure the safety of everyone around it, but still leave it able to make deliveries in 30 minutes or less.

This is a realistic goal, at least according Tushevs Aerials founder Georgi Tushevs. The robot's design helps: Amazon opted for an octocopter, with eight rotors, which adds to the weight and taxes the battery more, but it also means that if one or two of the rotors stops working, it will likely still operate.

"To achieve this range and duration, [the robot] would have to be larger than what's popular today," says Georgi. "These vehicles should be able to carry a six-cell battery and have more efficient, slower motors. They would have to be at least four times the size of say, the DJI Phantom or the TBS Discovery. This larger size generates safety risks."

The Safety Factor

Those risks include accidental collisions and the potential for drones to unexpectedly fail and fall out of the sky — the impetus behind the redundancies that Bezos mentioned. The Prime Air robots would need to react before a failure, and then quickly find a safe landing place that's close. The moment a drone crashes into someone is the moment that commercial drones go back to the drawing board.

"Drone traffic will have to be coordinated with full scale aircraft traffic," says Nina. "We want to be optimistic, but we take the starting point that human life is the most valuable. Avoiding accidents where people are hurt is much more important than those involving lost or mis-delivered packages."

Once the key safety issues are addressed by the FAA and drone designers, there are still logistical issues. How can a flying robot know the best place to land at a residence? At the very least, it shouldn't end up delivering packages to a rooftop.

Georgi says GPS-guided landing is accurate to within a few feet, but the landing area could be made more accurate with beacons. An Amazon Prime customer could set up an Amazon-issued "base station" on their property — a specific place for the drone to drop packages. Delivery to apartment buildings and businesses is likely out, with the exception of buildings with roof access or large balconies.

Finally, there's the possibility of hacking. It's been shown that drones can be hacked, although considering the aircraft's five-pound payload will often be little more than a few DVDs and a back scratcher, it's unlikely it will be worth the effort. And Amazon could easily install homing devices, separate from the "hackable" software to ensure the drones themselves are carefully tracked.

All of the technologies for commercial drone delivery robots are available today, and Tushevs, like Bezos, believes "absolutely" that it's the future. Although the hurdles of regulatory approval, safety features and delivery logistics are far from inconsequential, they may not be as insurmountable as you think. That tiny helicopter bringing you anything you desire on the Internet could be coming in for a smooth landing, after all.

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Image: Amazon

Topics: amazon, amazon prime, Amazon Prime Air, Drones, Prime Air, Robot, Tech