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posted by martyb on Thursday December 15 2016, @04:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the zoom-zoom! dept.

According to The Guardian, Amazon has made real drone deliveries to real customers in Cambridge, UK. At present the "Prime Air" service is only available to two Amazon Prime customers with large gardens who happen to live close to Amazon's UK depot, but they hope to extend the service to dozens more in the coming months.

Apparently the drone was fully autonomous, with no human operator, and the time from placing an order to delivery was just 13 minutes. A video of the delivery can be found in the linked article.

Is this the future?


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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday December 15 2016, @07:50PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Thursday December 15 2016, @07:50PM (#441737)

    Unfortunately, most of those become an issue as soon as your drone finishes the "travel from warehouse to target address" phase and begins the "deliver the package" phase, then it has to deal with the erratic wind, pigeons, wires, etc. as it approaches it's delivery point.

    Still, I could see that being handled well enough in time, if maybe not right away. And if the goal is 30-minute deliveries, as I think I've heard, then thieves can be minimized as well - the recipient knows it's on the way, and you can send them a text message saying "Package delivery will be completed in 2 minutes" so that they can be waiting to pick it up as soon as the drone has departed, not unlike waiting for the knock from a pizza delivery person.

    As for vandalism - that's harder to prevent, but it's already ridiculously easy to throw rocks at moving cars, but it doesn't happen often. Probably because it's generally pretty easy to ID the perpetrator, and there's no benefit to outweigh the cost.

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