Amazon Prime Air 'octocopter'
In one of the most unusual retail proposals yet, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has unveiled plans for Amazon Prime Air, which will utilise remote drones to deliver ordered items.
Appearing on American current affairs program 60 minutes last night, Bezos went on to reveal Amazon Prime Air - a means to get Amazon packages to customers in just half an hour.
The service would use unmanned electrically powered 'octocopters' to deliver packages straight from the Amazon warehouse to houses or businesses within a ten mile radius, cutting out the time-sapping middle man antics of couriers and mail services.
These octocopters can apparently carry items weighing up to 5lbs, or about 2.26kg. That wouldn’t have been quite enough to lug a new PS4 or Xbox One to you on launch day. It would, however, be enough to account for 86 percent of all Amazon deliveries, and Bezos is hoping to get Amazon Prime Air into service within five years.
It certainly won’t be any earlier than 2015, when the US FAA introduces new rules on commercial drone usage.
Each octocopter would be entirely autonomous - they’d simply be loaded with your GPS coordinates and sent on their merry way.
Of course, there are a number of potential pitfalls and problems to overcome first. Bezos reckons that "the hard part here is putting in all the redundancy, all the reliability, all the systems you need to say, 'Look, this thing can't land on somebody's head while they're walking around their neighborhood.'"
We can sense a number of lawsuits coming Mr Bezos's way already.
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Via: Forbes
