Today, people don’t have to go markets to buy what they
want; they can just order from internet, and E-markets will deliver products to
people’s house in short amount of time. This is really efficient way, but what
if we don’t need any human labor to deliver?
Amazon
CEO Jeff Bezos revealed an experimental drone-based delivery service in a 60
Minutes segment on Sunday. Bezos said the service, dubbed Amazon Prime Air,
could be ready for customer use in “four or five years.”
“I
know this looks like science fiction, it’s not,” said Bezos, before adding that
“this is early, this is still years away.”
Bezos
said the drone could carry objects of up to 5 lb. (2.27 kg) within a 10-mile
(16 km) radius of an Amazon distribution center. Given that Amazon has been
steadily building distribution centers in an increasing number of urban areas,
the service would theoretically cover a significant number of customers.
The
craft are autonomous, per Bezos: an Amazon employee would enter a delivery
recipient’s location and away the aircraft would fly.
“The
hard part here is putting in all the redundancy,” Bezos told interviewer
Charlie Rose. “All the reliability to say this can’t land on somebody’s head.”
Amazon’s
drone delivery service will also have to comply with the Federal Aviation
Administration’s new airspace rules for unmanned aircraft, which the agency is
planning to have in place by 2015.
In
preview segments, Bezos promised “something he wanted to unveil for the first
time,” leading people on Twitter to speculate that it could be an Amazon
television. Others joked that perhaps Bezos would buy CBS (he stunned the media
world when it was announced in August that he had bought the
Washington Post for $250 million).
This drone delivery
technology seems ridiculous; what if the drone functions wrongly, and drone
doesn’t deliver to the right places? People can’t trust drone since it’s just a
robot: drone might malfunction, or people can hack drones. However, surprisingly,
this is possible.
First of all, GPS helps this technology. Today, we have Global
Positioning System (GPS) that can navigate every movement; GPS connects to multiple
satellites to determine the current location and the path to the destination.
This technology will help to advance this drone delivery technology to be
safer.
Second, we are using this kind of technology even now.
There is a system called “Autopilot” that guides a vehicle without assistance
from a person. This system is applied to airplanes and missiles; furthermore,
there is Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). UAV is using autopilot system that
computer controls all of its functions. Since this technology is used even now,
drone delivery system is not impossible.
Now, let’s think about the benefits of drone delivery
system; what will happen if drone delivers the product instead of people? Well,
first, it might be faster to deliver products than before; since drone flies to
the destination, it will not suffer from traffic; therefore, it will be faster
than normal deliveries. Also, since Amazon will send multiple drones, it will
take less time for one person to receive it than one truck holding multiple
items. Not only that, but it also will take less money to deliver; since
e-market doesn’t have to hire people to deliver, it will cost less than human
delivery if the drones perform well.
However, there are several problems this technology will
face; first, drones can malfunction easily. It can have bug and errors from
coding or from environment; what if there is a rain, tornado, or dust that
causes drones to malfunction? Not only it will hurt the drone, it might also
damage the product it’s carrying. Second, since drone is based on coding, it is
possible for hack the drones; it will be much easier to steal the products! In
order for Amazon and other markets to use this technology, they will have to
overcome these problems.
http://techland.time.com/2013/12/01/amazon-bezos-drones/
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