The future of Package delivery is bright after E-commerce giant, Amazon, successfully launched trials for its drone delivery service in UK. Deliveries to two Amazon customers have already been successful.
According to the Verge, Amazon is doing trial runs of it drone delivery service in UK and not in the United States due to regulators granting them important permissions to operate the highly automated drones. The first delivery run using highly automated drone commenced on December 7 -- the first order was an Amazon Fire TV video-streaming device and bag of popcorn.
Today, Amazon Prime made its first drone delivery in England: https://t.co/OHM1PJ0cKC
— WIRED (@WIRED) December 14, 2016
For now, the Amazon drone delivery service is limited to small items five pounds or less, hoping to finish deliveries in less then 30 minutes. Amazon's first delivery -- which was in a house near Cambridge, UK -- took 13 minutes to complete from the time the customer clicked deliver.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the Amazon drone delivery initiative, called Prime Air, is a part of Amazon's long-term plan to develop it's own logistic system and hopefully one day compete with big logistics companies like UPS and and FedEx. Amazon's Shipping costs rose to $3.9 billion in the third quarter of this year.
Amazon's highly automated drones can be operated beyond line of sight and have the ability to sense and avoid obstacles. However, there are still some challenges in drone delivery that Amazon may face in the long run, like drones losing power mid-flight, hitting civilians, or people shooting it down en-route to it's destination. Also, most drones can't fly further than a dozen miles away from its operator.
The Amazon drone delivery trials is currently only available to customers close to a specialized warehouse in UK. According to the Verge, customers will need to place a specialized QR signage on their lawn so that the drone will know where it can land.
Companies like Google and New Zealand's Flirtey Inc. have also tried their hands on drone delivery, but google was met with design struggles. In September, United Parcel Inc. also launched a drone delivery test for medicines.
