Cosmic Log
If there are any Robin Hoods out there who are thinking about shooting down drones while they’re making deliveries, Amazon has a patented plan to stop you.
The patent, filed in 2014 but published just last week, lays out countermeasures for potential threats ranging from computer hacking to lightning flashes to bows and arrows.
If nothing else, the 33-page application illustrates how many things could possibly go wrong with an autonomous navigation system for unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs.
Amazon’s multimillion-dollar effort to deliver goods via drone currently has just two customers in the English countryside, but this could well be the way a multibillion-dollar industry gets started.
The current state of Amazon’s Prime Air project came to light today in an online announcement and video from the Seattle-based company, plus a tweet from CEO Jeff Bezos. The first delivery to an actual customer, identified only as Richard B. of Cambridgeshire, occurred on Dec. 7.
In the coming months, Amazon expects to expand the customer base from the current two to dozens of folks living within several miles of a specially designed drone fulfillment center near Cambridge. Hundreds more will be added as time goes on.
As an online retail giant, Amazon can use its engineering prowess and the vast capabilities of the digital world to track and analyze how customers use its site.
So it’s only natural that the company, in its first brick-and-mortar convenience store, would want to create a real-world version of the same thing.
The new Amazon Go store logs customers in when they walk through the door, knows instantly when they pick an item up from the shelf, automatically tallies what they put in their carts or shopping bags, uses past purchases to improve their shopping experience, and automatically charges their accounts when they walk out — no need for checkout lines — making it nearly frictionless to buy something.
In short, it’s a physical manifestation of Amazon.com.
First there were supermarket shelves. Then barcode scanners, then self-checkout lines, then online shopping. Amazon’s move to take the grocery checkout counter completely out of the loop is the latest disappearing act for the brick-and-mortar retail experience.
But it’s not unexpected: Walmart and Whole Foods also have been working on ways to streamline grocery shopping, using automation and robotics. And the competition could heat up quickly.
“Retailers will be looking to understand what percentage of their current customers are utilizing Amazon, with the thinking that these will be the customers that are most at risk to the Amazon threat,” Matt Sargent, senior vice president for retail at Frank N. Magid Associates, wrote last week in a post that anticipated Amazon’s latest move.
Magid’s research suggests that Amazon shoppers are weighted in favor of the under-44 population, those with kids in the household, those who go to grocery stores more than once a week, and those who make it a point to buy locally. In short, just the kinds of customers that grocery stores want to hang onto.
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Regulators have to work out lots of issues before they let drones start delivering packages routinely, but in Britain at least, there’s a timetable.
“We’ve got a soft target of 2020,” Michael Clark, deputy director at Britain’s Department for Transport, told GeekWire. And although the Federal Aviation Administration hasn’t announced its own timetable, 2020 could well be a soft target for U.S. operations as well.
Clark and other British transport officials discussed the U.K. perspective on unmanned aircraft systems last week while visiting the States for the Drone World Expo in San Jose, Calif.
Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority is playing a key role in Amazon’s plans to develop delivery drones, highlighted by the Seattle-based retailer’s flight test program near Cambridge.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos spoke warmly about the company’s relationship with British regulators last month at Seattle’s Museum of Flight. “We’re getting really good cooperation from the British equivalent of the FAA, the CAA,” he said. “It’s incredible. It’s really cool.”
For what it’s worth, the feeling is mutual: “Amazon is a pathfinder,” Clark said.
Someday, you’ll be printing out a landing pad to guide an Amazon drone to its delivery, or maybe taking a suborbital space trip on a Blue Origin rocket ship, or marveling over the mechanism of a clock designed to run for 10,000 years.
Such were the visions laid out by Amazon’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, on Oct. 22 as he received one of this year’s Pathfinder Awards from the Museum of Flight.
Boeing says it will convert nine used 767 passenger jets into freighters for Atlas Air Worldwide Holdings, which will use them in its cargo transport operations for Amazon.
Amazon made a splash in August when it unveiled its first branded Prime Air jet and spilled the details about its air cargo ambitions.
New York-based Atlas Air as well as Ohio-based Air Transport Services Group have been flying packages for the online retailing giant for months. By the end of 2018, each of the companies expects to be operating 20 leased 767 jets for Amazon deliveries.
Atlas Air spokeswoman Bonnie Rodney told GeekWire via email that her company is currently using one aircraft – the branded 767 that made its public debut at Seattle’s Seafair festival. But she added that “we have acquired the vast majority of the aircraft that we will need for Amazon … and we have secured all of the conversion slots” for Amazon Prime Air’s jets.
That includes the nine slots announced today.
Amazon is expanding its drone testing operation in the English countryside, to smooth the way for what it hopes will be an aerial package delivery system. But exactly where are the tests taking place?
Based on clues from the BBC, plus interviews with local sources, Business Insider’s Sam Shead went out to farm fields southeast of Cambridge, near a place called Worsted Lodge.
In one of the fields, he found two bases that were located at each end of the acreage, about 400 meters (a quarter-mile) apart. Next to each of the bases, there were apparent landing spots made from patches of artificial grass.
The locale is near Amazon’s research and development center in Cambridge, which would make it handy for drone testing teams. But there’s at least one piece of evidence that’s missing: No drones were spotted.
A newly published patent application almost literally delves into the nuts and bolts of the package-delivering drones that Amazon is developing – but it also makes clear that the look of the drones could vary, depending on where and how they’re being used.
The proposed designs include quadcopters and octocopters, drones with motors as wide as 18 inches that are mounted vertically to push the craft and its cargo through the air, and drones with fixed wings that extend well beyond the craft’s protective shroud.
That safety shroud is the common thread in all of the described designs.
The application was filed in December 2014 by Gur Kimchi and Rick Welsh, two of the lead engineers for Amazon Prime Air, but published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office only last week.
Amazon’s first branded cargo jet made its daylight debut today at Seattle’s Boeing Seafair Air Show, but not before show announcer Mark Christopher drummed up a bit of drama.
As the program got under way, Christopher drew the attention of hundreds of spectators to a white dot approaching from the north. “It seems like a normal jet, but this is about to make history,” he said.
Then, as Seafair fans made out the Prime Air lettering on the side of the Boeing 767-300 jet, and the Amazon smile logo painted on its tail, the announcer made the formal introduction.
“Flying for the first time is Amazon One!” Christopher boomed as the plane buzzed past, just 500 feet above Lake Washington.