Sunday, December 1, 2013

Drone Delivery, is it possible?


            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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